The Runaway Bodyguard

by scifipony


Chapter 57 — On Fire

Idid not realize that I had just 10 seconds to live.

"Well, that was easier," I said, gasping.

The last EBI agent, a puce fellow in a blue suit, galloped for the building exit. The fire alarm blared wah-wah-wah and strobed. The door jam to burst into flames, lit by my last Force spell. Stinging sweat dripped into my right eye and I began blinking.

I maintained my spell queue and fiery numbers on semi-polar orbits; they processed right to left like comets through my view of the world. For an instant, I imagined my guardian Proper Step, his mustachioed face twisted into a disapproving glare. What might he think to learn that his carefully cultured ward, the Countess Aurora Midnight, the Earl of Grin Having, had mastered battle magic?

My imagination filled it in. His ears turned forward and flattened. Anger.

I heard—or rather felt in my insides—a powerful krump! It sounded deeper than the largest most bass tympani drum struck powerfully once with my stomach next to it. It felt like a punch. Bits of ceiling tile tumbled down. Desks and filing cabinets hopped forward. My heart, pummeled, stopped, skipped that beat, then limped back into rhythm.

I staggered and fell to my fore-knees as I glanced up at the ceiling, to the second floor, beyond the wall to the post office.

A fuel canister must have exploded. The crates of ammonium nitrate had not.

"Foal!" I yelled. At myself.

I snapped together the vectors to the doorway I'd seen the last agent gallop toward. A two-story glass façade. I spun-up teleport out of my queue.

Queuing spells saved a huge amount of time, but took a finite amount of time nonetheless. Time to gasp a single breath.

My world went black. Frigid cold limed me in frost and instantly attacked my open eyes with sapping pain. Utter vacuum tried twisting out my lungs through my still gaping mouth. Time wasn't suspended in-between mid-teleport.

For the first time, I wished it to last forever.

It didn't.

I popped back into existence just beyond the travertine portico of the EBI Headquarters. I had transformed only my x-y coordinates so I still faced the street.

Bridge Street here ran roughly east-west, the same as Plaza East in front of the old Equestrian post office where the delivery van had been parked. The western sun should have been to my right. Despite that, orange light brighter than noon mid-summer illuminated the building ahead, from the north. It felt like a furnace at my flank. I saw a blurred band of instantly condensed moisture and lofted dust slam into its brown marble exterior, then splash like a wave against a seawall. Every window burst, punched in before its glass was sucked up and over the five stories of stone.

I understood then, by miracle, I'd avoided the explosion's shockwave*.

Smoke, dust, and fog rolled over in a cylindrical eddy, then streaked outward. The glass façade of the EBI building, obliterated, tumbled like sea foam across the street.

Ponies, bowled over, slid away from me in the flow.

The vacuum caused by the passing shockwave grabbed my cloak, but not before bits of masonry and glass peppered the tough material. It was like being pelted with stones thrown by a crowd in anger. The cloak tore, then flapped forward over my head. The bruising slap to my flank made me instinctively rear.

Under any other circumstances I might have fought losing my disguise, but I let it be sucked from my forelegs as I skidded away in the wake of the shockwave. Half a hundred EBI agents and support ponies would remember the cloaked crazy pony who'd attacked them (and got the building evacuated). Best I lost the cloak.

I looked behind.

I saw the shell of the Hooflyn Equestrian Bureau of Investigation headquarters in flames, the glass blasted away. The glow of the explosion faded, belied by blistering heat. I saw a burning column of dirty red-brown smoke rise, then spread into a rolling cap of the same noxious color as it cooled while more smoke rose.

I had thought nothing could match the horror of dodging and defending myself in the middle of a riot where gangs fought gangs with Force spells and the constables added an additional front to the war, me running flack as a bodyguard trying to save my employer from what could only be called Tartarus in Equestria.

The explosion aftermath radiated heat that crinkled the hair on my muzzle, but the sight seared into my brain like a hot brand fresh from the coals.

How I would find myself standing in Hooflyn that horrifying day is a cautionary tale...

End of Part Three


*Don't tell Starlight, but her unicorn thaumaturgy granted her wish to survive.