Cadance Does A Die Hard

Cadance was admittedly not relaxing. It was a slow day in the 'office' which amounted to Cadance sitting around the office a few floors above her bedroom and a short jog away from the palace kitchens. Stretching out her paperwork until Celestia lowered the Sun, and Cadance could pretend like everything was normal and the paperwork didn't dictate the functionality of civilization.

Then reality exploded.

Like, all of it. All at once.

A simple thing, something Cadance would not have had a viable verbal explanation for. Like an out of body experience, Cadance watched Eternity fold over itself as her mind and soul found a new home in a new place, in a new Time. It was instant, jarring, and the sudden lack of being pregnant caused her to vomit onto the angry, purple crystal flooring of the prison cell she ended up in after reality calmed down.

The first two things at the forefront of Cadance's mind:

Sombra's Crystal Curse, decorating her horn, and sapping at the magic inside her.

And the fact that her baby was missing.

Silently, Cadance turned into a ball of light, the crystals around her horn shattered and exploded into atoms. The bars, if they could even be called that, also turned to dust as Cadance channeled however much power was necessary to find what she'd lost. There were no thoughts past escape and rescue, nothing other than the near ritualistic thump of her chest as she blasted a hole through the Spire.

And then Discord hobbled out of the cell from her side shouting "Freedom!" Clanking with the ball and chain around his ankle, a solid addition to the pinstripe coat and hat he was wearing.

All Of The Things Happening All At Once came to a screeching halt, to which Cadance tried to vocalize something akin to 'What in the ever lovin-' which ended up sounding more like: "Ahuffizhzigmbuwhaut?"

Discord's head peaked around the corner of the cell, "Aren't you coming?"

Cadance shot a beam of blue magic into his face. He took the hit, and a noise came out like if a noodle was actually a dog that was really a balloon being strangled by a river. Two flops, and Cadance got her hooves under her and stomped up to him.

"Rud-"

"WHAT DID YOU DO!?"

Of course, the real question was 'where is my child', but she didn't have the voice to outright claim her unborn foal was missing. That would have been making it too real for her to handle. Having your soul torn out and shoved into a body mostly resembling yourself was an experience to say the least, and Cadance's day of extending paperwork had suddenly gone from the normal ambient levels of stress that come with not ruining an entire culture to The World Ending levels of stress.

Discord, apparently catching onto his incoming vaporization, lifted his hands and tried to wave her off as he used his tail fur to tip-toe walk further away as she loomed. "Nothing! Calm down firecracker! Really! Relax, give me a second to explain!"

Discord offering to explain anything was equally jarring, and Cadance held her assault off for another moment.

"Sparkle." Discord clasped his hands together and pointed forwards with a silent 'boi' before continuing, "She got into a fight with someone who got their hooves on world bending time travel magic. Harmony is at work, and some things became more real by accident." He let off a nervous smile, "Everything will be fine in roughly thirty minutes!"

Cadance closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her zen was interrupted by a weighted blanket appearing over her shoulders and an upside down cup of gravity defying hot coco appearing in her hooves. She opened her eyes to look at a sheepish Discord, "Better?"

Another breath. "Everything will go back to normal?"

Discord's face morphed, literally, into something that could have been considered serious. "Yes. Everything."

A sigh of relief, and melting into the ground. Cadance's heart remembered what it meant to pace itself, and Cadance did her best attempt to recreate a balloon deflating.

"Don't look so glum Empress, the-"

"Please." Cadance interrupted, pressing a hoof to the throbbing in between her eyes. "Give me... I don't know. What even happened?"

Discord put on a pair of reading glasses and Twilight's mane. "Well, if you must know, Time is a fickle thing. It's impossible to change it, until it isn't, something I know plenty of." A whiteboard and a stick appeared, "Thing is, ritualistic relativistic time loops are just about as possible as the rest of reality, and because things have already happened, technically all of this is over already; with a self closing loop, no magical potential was expended, leading to a simple but utterly exciting folding of reality over itself to compensate for the sudden sense of Meaning altering along with a new false future functioning as a narrative focus for the-"

"Okay. I get it." Cadance didn't, "But why are... you here?"

"Mwuah?" Discord floated up, talon to chest, "What? You think something as little as Time would change who I am?" Discord crossed his arms over his face, which didn't matter, since his eyes were on his chest now, "I'm offended."

Cadance rolled her eyes, "Then why am I here, shouldn't I be... different? Different memories? Why is everything the same? Besides the obvious."

Discord shrugged. "Dunno, but you are a functioning part of reality that can't simply be erased, even by Time." He lowered himself upside down to be face to face with his rotated body parts. "Anyways, go have some fun with it. Nothing you do here is permanent, I came to check on you, but I'm also about to go turn The Moon into cheese like I've always wanted to. Ciao!"

Discord slithered his way out of the hole Cadance blasted in the wall. Cadance sipped the upside down coco.

Huh. Okay.

Another deep breath to further calm her heart led her to hear the stomping and far away shouting of 'the princess is escaping!' The precursor to a bunch of guards flooding a room. Sombra's Crystal Curse being present at all, among the new visual mood of the Spire, and the fact that there was a dungeon at all gave Cadance a pretty good idea of when she was.

Nothing's permanent.

A pair of guards wearing horrendously gaudy suits and helmets rushed down into the tiny dungeon hallway. "Stay where you are!" - "Halt!"

Cadance briefly considered chucking them both out of the hole, but it was a long drop, and they were covered in magic sapping crystals anyways. Instead, she followed Discord's lead and threw herself out of the hole and into the air. There was a certain limit Cadance had when it came to dealing with stress. Normally the threshold included a dose of her husband to keep her sane, or a breathing exercise. Something.

The world, maybe Fate itself, seemed intent on pushing that limit. Recently Cadance had, with the help of a friend, developed a new skill for dealing with stress. A more accurate term would be discovering, but in the brief moment Cadance hung in the air after jumping, the moment in which she saw the state of the Empire, the twisting black crystal, the chains, the hurt.

She saw use for an application, after all, for the next thirty minutes?

Property damage was a-okay.

So instead of spreading her wings, Cadance lit her horn with half of her husband's shield spell, twisting the matrix at the tip of her horn as she fell, she tugged at the magic and pulled the solid force down over herself for the sake of thematic. A tweak of the shape, a little more power, and then-

Boom.

Cadance came crashing down like a wrecking ball into, what looked like from the air, a patrol of more garish guards. The shield swallowed the impact of her hooves sinking knee high into the crystal road, and the explosion that followed after she released the spell with a wave of frustration into the ground turned the road into broken glass and set anything on the road not directly attached to the bedrock beneath it loosely into a trajectory facing up.

Cadance smiled. She remembered how this felt. It was hard to push past the act of destruction, but that was okay. This wasn't her Empire, this was a mess, twisted by some insane pony they hadn't yet saved. Someone, probably one of the guards that had hit a wall instead of the air, threw a spear in her direction. She caught it in her telekinesis, flipped it around, and sank it into the crystal next to the pony's head before they could blink.

She chirped, "I wouldn't!" and then pranced down the street, looking for something else to destroy.

She definitely didn't appreciate the creeping purple crystals crawling up over everything. So she lit her horn again, and a pair of ideas crossed through her mind as the bubbling cascade of dark magic fell from her eyes and her horn. The vibration spell she used previously was pretty effective, but what if it was just a little bit more...

Elemental.

The magic in her horn didn't die, it sank down into her skull as black flame lit behind her eyes. This was her Empire. Her home. Sombra had twisted it into a monstrosity once, twice, but no longer. Frustration, revenge, hatred, and a dash of the Royal Canterlot Voice spell turned into a roaring shockwave of twisting black fire and reverberating air that turned any black crystal near Cadance into dust and ash. Chains fell away to nearby slaves, and in one case, a building propped up by black crystal collapsed on itself.

woops

Cadance felt the wind on her back shift, and she spun a wing and twisted through the pressure wave from a beam of magic full of fear, pain, and the intent to harm. She half danced through the air on the gust of wind before daintily setting her hooves back on the crystal ground as Sombra landed in a cloud of smoke, solidifying back into himself in a split second to glare contemptuously at her.

Finally. A challenge.

That was the thing about release. You could scream and rant and bash your head into a wall until it or the wall broke, but after expelling all of the energy, the stress and the emotion would always still be there. It only really mattered if someone else could see, if someone else knew. At least for Cadance, that was the part that mattered. It used to feel strange to think inflicting someone else with her stress and pain, her fears for the future, would work for stress relief, but it really only mattered who it was.

Sombra? Not even a little bit guilty about what was about to happen.

The King snickered, "Yo-"

And then got body slammed by Cadance in the split second he blinked. He simply didn't have the reaction time to respond to a pegasus in her prime with eighty years of experience, not to mention an Alicorn. She twisted into the air, bringing them both above the airborne property line and kicked off of him when she felt magic growing.

He fired a blast of magic at her that she loop'de'looped past, turning in the air to fire her own beam his direction. He blocked with another ray, but wasn't prepared for Cadance's follow up of body slamming him again. Sombra was an umbra turned unicorn. He wasn't used to air combat, nor hit and run tactics. Immediately after she slammed into him again, she spun around and let him fall, following down as he fired another beam of decrepit fearful magic at her.

She filled the air with Love, drawing on her divinity until her eyes blazed white and the charred purple magic sprouting on her horn turned pink. A simple rectangular box shimmering with the Love Cadance was channeling into it slammed into his spell, and as Sombra landed and tried to move, the box slammed down into him too. He poofed into smoke, and Cadance drew down and pressed harder, using a mix of telekinesis and physical strength to force the conjured object down over the tyrant as he tried to escape.

A simple twist of her intentions and a spark of creativity turned the rectangle, irregular. Quickly reshaping it, she brought the border down and turned the box of love into a prison. She used a quick burst of telekinesis to launch a piece of rubble into the air at what looked like mach one; then she jumped away, into the air and started charging her horn again.

Sombra roared, and the inside of the container turned pitch black as crystals started to spear their way through the interior. It took him four seconds to burst the conjured object, long enough for Cadance to load, aim and fire a specialty beam spell designed to turn a regular crystal ball into a disco ball, only turned up to the point where the air around the white beam ignited.

Sombra, currently surrounded in crystal, disappeared under the blazing crisscrossing lines as each individual facet of crystal redirected the beam and turned his explosive exit into just exploding. Cadance was blown back by the pressure wave, but kept her wings flapping.

The dust settled.

Cadance let herself fall three stories onto the ground, sailing through the air in a dive, dragging the wind down with her so that her landing cleared the crater she'd just created of rubble and dust. Sombra was revealed, dazedly trying to stand as his smoky form pulled itself back into a pony while he tried blinking the lights out of his eyes to return to a fighting stance.

Cadance punched him in the face. Her hoof went through, revealing once again, his true umbra form, and Cadance reached out with her telekinesis, flared her wings and pulled. The bottom half of Sombra, the part Cadance had gripped in her magic, went flying, whereas his head, the part she'd just turned into smoke, blew forwards from the magic in her flap as they both separated. Sombra's horn, the only thing that didn't turn into smoke, clattered against the crystal as his body turned to smoke too.

A spear of black crystal rose from a broken building from her side, and time slowed down as Cadance calmly stepped out of the path, and returned fire by ripping the crystal from the ground Sombra was standing on, flipping him over, and then slamming it back down on him.

Cadance exhaled and sagged her shoulders. Relief flooded her, and she blinked contentedly as Sombra pulled his smoke from under the ground. "Goodness, you can't believe how good this felt." She pushed her mane back over her head with her hoof, trying to smooth it out a little.

Sombra glared at her, but he apparently accepted the pause in the beat down.

Cadance pulled out her 'Princess' voice, and mixed it with as much snark and 'higher than thou' she could manage. It came out relatively similar to the normal way the Canterlot elite talked. "It's a shame you're not any stronger. I bet Silver could have given me a way better fight."

Sombra seethed, his eyes flashing red, "Bet-"

He was interrupted by the piece of rubble Cadance sent into the air. It was sheer luck he hadn't moved after she threw him to where she thought it was going to land, but the hilarious ecstasy of not only landing a shot like that, but the comical nature of interrupting the mad tyrant again led Cadance to giggles and snorting.

Sombra fired another blast of magic that Cadance flipped under, taking to the air and just... leaving, laughing all the while as she flew up towards the border of the Heart's shield, twisted, as it was. As the adrenaline faded, she could tell she'd be feeling the mana burn from that little exercise later, but in her eyes, it was worth it.

It took her a minute to get high enough to breach the shield, and then the cloud layer, where she flapped one more time, dropping onto the soft and bouncy substance. While audibly saying 'boing' to herself like a school filly.

She had a minute or so to catch her breath, so she searched the sky, spotting the giant ball of cheese Discord was waving around as a constellation just as reality warbled again and Cadance was swept up in an omnidirectional wave of light.