I'm not sure who's crazier, Vampirella or th' Cap'n, Al thought to himself as he watched the two. He heard Wilfred's exclamation over the channel they were all tuned to, and just then his sixth sense suddenly flamed over; there was no other way to describe it as he slapped the rear gun's starboard interruptor off and cranked the gun up to the vertical again as a shadow came roaring up from behind. A split-second check of the periscope, however, and he barely managed to not elbow the firing bar as he realized the shadow was the brit's ship, upside down, sliding by a scant eight feet or less overhead. Al nearly gasped as the vampire, also noticing the brit, sprang from her perch on the ridge of the Duck's fuselage, turned a somersault which she combined with a slash at the Brit's tail section, and then turning the returning backslash of the ta chi into a slash at jace's blade. The two swords made white glittering sparks as they met while the Vampire was still in mid-transit, and then the harridan landed light as a feather on the far wing of the Captain's biplane. But whereas jace needed the walking-wires to stay aboard, the vampiress stood as if on a sidewalk on terra firma, up on the balls of her feet, preparing to spring yet again.
Al cranked the rear gun around, keeping the Duck even with the Dragon in case Jace needed a place to escape to, and even as the vampire crouched and tensed to spring again, he both eyeballed the shot and sighted it through the periscope.
"What's the matter, pretty one?" Meri called across the Dragon's wings. "has your heart quailed already?" she glanced from the captain to the too-intent face of Al, and a thought struck her. "Or," she asked in a viciously teasing, insinuating voice, "Is that pilot a dear friend or love of yours?" she laughed. "Perhaps we can share him, you and-!"
Her words were cut short, suddenly, by the sound of the Duck's rear gun as the .30 caliber Vickers-Browning cut loose at the very extreme edge of it's forward-facing capability, and several rounds blasted into her midsection. Amazingly, she did not fall off of the wing - but she did not attack jace, either. She turned serious and shouted to the captain, "You should give us what we want, girl, perhaps yourself as well. The German fanatics say that you and he are both wasted here." she shrugged as the bullets began to spill out of their holes and clatter away across the wingtop. "Or, I could just kill you both here and now -" and she sprang just as Al fired again. this time, though,the impacts of the bullets caught her with enough force to knock her off course, and she missed her footing and tumbled away, to disappear into the cloud of flame and debris of a triplane that suddenly flamed to destruction from one of the other aces' gunfire.
Al snapped the captain a salute and banked away, then banked back and sideslipped under the Dragon and after the vampire, leaving the captain to wonder if he'd taken leave of his senses. Al himself wasn't sure why he couldn't just leave be; perhaps it was the look of incredible weariness and despair that flashed across the vampires face as she took the bullets he'd fired. Something was not quite right about this situation, he just... knew it. But the Vampire suddenly beat her wings, once, twice - and was gone like the flash of a lightning bolt.
