Diana was not backing down either, though at least she regarded Hela as a serious threat. Or a threat, anyway, which was more than she had for the Jotuns. The last two didn’t last long, either, and Diana couldn’t say that she minded. She had hardly looked at Thor once the fighting began, trusting him to know how to take care of himself, and therein lay the problem. Diana should have been more aware, should have remembered her training, because it was never wise to disregard a teammate, even if one was absolutely certain that teammate would be fine.
Because what might happen would be that that teammate’s sister would shift ever so slightly as she saw what her brother was doing, and an idiot Amazonian might also shift just a little bit without realizing what he was doing, and put herself squarely in the path of lightning. In Diana’s defense, it had not exactly occurred to her to be concerned about Thor’s ability to harness lightning in the first place. She was a daughter of Zeus, and she knew what no one else on this battlefield did.
Not that it mattered, because the bolt intended for Hela had missed, or rather, Diana had stepped in front of it as she’d followed the other woman’s movements. It had hit her square in the back, and for a moment, her entire body was limned in light. She was not even precisely on her feet, the energy between the soles of her sneakers and the concrete too much to be borne, lifting her off of them as lightning crackled along her skin, and Diana screamed.
But it was not the scream of the dying, or even the wounded. This circumstance had only arisen once, when her brother Ares had thrown lightning at her, and as then, now. The only difference was that Diana did not have her bracelets, which helped her focus her powers and made controlling them much easier. In short, she had been unleashed, and how unfortunate that Hela happened to be standing in front of her when it happened. She seemed to realize her plight as well, and raised an arm, intending to stab. Diana knocked her hand away, barely felt the blade as it grazed her side and hip downward, and planted her foot squarely in Hela’s midsection.
It bought her the space she needed to bring her forearms together and give the energy Thor had boosted her with somewhere to go… and a little of her own, too. So now, it was no simple golden force field that emanated when she slammed her arms together, but a golden haze shot through with crackles of lightning, that grew into a focused beam by the time it reached Hela.
She didn’t get to see what happened, because she’d gone entirely too far, and while she did not fall unconscious, she did gray out and fall to one knee, focusing on the concrete in front of her and how it felt against the palm she’d caught herself with. And boy did she hope Thor had it from here.