The service elevator doors hissed shut a half-second before a volley of golden entropy bolts slagged the control panel on the other side. Alistair leaned against the wall, catching his breath, the scabbard warm against his side. The elevator music—a tinny rendition of "Danny Boy"—felt surreally calm.
"The luck field is dissipating," Kassy reported, her voice clinical. "Fading like a gambler's resolve at dawn. Estimate sixty seconds of usable 'suggestibility' remaining. And we have company in the lobby."
"Plan?" Alistair asked, straightening his tie uselessly. His jacket was wrapped around the scabbard.
"Traditionally, one runs very fast while screaming."
The elevator dinged, opening not into a service corridor, but directly onto the edge of the main casino floor. Seamus had clearly overridden the systems, flushing his quarry into the open. A squad of four Clurichauns, led by a particularly sharp-looking Leprechaun with a gold-toothed snarl, spotted him instantly.
"There! The lobby! Cut him off!"
Alistair burst into a sprint. He wasn't aiming for the main doors—those would be sealed and guarded. He needed chaos, a diversion. He cut through a bank of "Lucky Labyrinth" slot machines, their spinning reels showing minotaurs and glowing jewels.
"Twenty seconds of useful probability left," Kassy announced.
"Then let's make a withdrawal." Alistair focused on the feeling of the fickle energy still clinging to Kassy's blade. As he ran past a high-denomination machine being played by a bored-looking river spirit, he slapped its side with Kassy's flat.
The machine didn't just hit a jackpot. It exploded in a cataclysm of synthetic fanfare. Lights strobed, sirens wailed, and a geyser of gold-plated tokens erupted from the payout chute, not in a stream, but in a single, concentrated blast that hit the lead Clurichaun square in the chest, knocking him into his comrades like a bowling ball of sudden, inconvenient wealth.
"Jackpot!" Alistair yelled over his shoulder, not breaking stride.
He veered towards the poker pit. A serious game was underway between a hooded figure whose face was swirling mist, a sphinx (playing silently, her eyes full of riddles), and a man with faintly scaled skin. Alistair leapt, planting a foot on the corner of their felt table and pushing off. As he did, he let the last dregs of the luck field pulse through his foot and into the table leg.
The leg didn't break; it simply decided, at that quantum moment, that it had always been broken. With a sound of dry, ancient splintering, it gave way. The table listed violently. Stacks of chips, cards, and drinks slid into laps. The sphinx let out a rare, startled yowl. The misty figure billowed in outrage, and the scaled man cursed in a sibilant tongue. It created a perfect, indignant roadblock for his pursuers.
"Power depleted," Kassy said. "We are now operating on sheer, unadulterated bad judgment."
"My specialty," Alistair wheezed, skidding around a corner.
He found himself in a quieter, darker section of the casino labeled "The Enchanted Glen." It was the indoor atrium. Fake twilight glowed from hidden panels above, illuminating a sad, silent forest of about a dozen trees growing from ornate ceramic pots. The air was cool and humid, smelling of damp soil and, underneath, the sterile tang of nutrient solutions and magic. It was a beautiful prison.
The trees were ancient oaks and ashes, but their leaves drooped. And within each trunk, Alistair's second sight revealed the faint, trapped glow of a Hamadryad—a tree spirit bound to her wood, her form visible as a ripple of sorrow in the bark. They were decorations. Living mood lighting.
His escape route was a dead end. The fake rock wall behind the grove was solid, and the sounds of pounding feet and shouted orders came from both passages leading in. He was cornered.
The Leprechaun squad and two Clurichauns fanned out, blocking the exits, weapons raised. Seamus's lieutenant stepped forward, gold tooth gleaming. "End of the line, Finch. Hand over the scabbard. The boss might let you work off your contract… in a century or two."
Alistair's eyes weren't on the guns. They were on the trees. On the face that slowly formed in the bark of the largest oak—a feminine visage of timeless beauty, etched with profound exhaustion and despair. Her eyes, the color of aged moss, opened and watched the standoff with hollow resignation. This was a fate worse than death: eternal, static boredom.
He made a decision.
Slowly, deliberately, he turned his back on the armed Leprechauns. He faced the great oak and took a knee, placing Kassy on the fake moss floor. He unwrapped his jacket, revealing the scabbard, and laid it down too—a gesture of non-threatening intent.
"You are the Hamadryads of the Black Forest," he said, his voice soft, reverent, cutting through the tension. "The daughters of the deep glens where the mist hangs eternal. Stolen. Used for… décor." He reached out and, with a gentleness unimaginable in a vault under fire, placed his bare palm against the oak's trunk.
The dryad within gasped. Her wooden lips parted. The touch was not that of a thief or a conqueror. It was the touch of an archaeologist—someone who understood the weight of history, the sacredness of roots, the story in the grain. He felt her pain, the deep, aching longing for true soil, for real wind, for the conversation of birds that weren't clockwork automata.
"Help me," Alistair whispered, his words only for her. "And I swear, on the waters of the River Styx itself, I will translocate you. Not to another pot. To Redwood National Park. Real earth, a hundred feet deep. Real sky, stretching forever. Clean rain. No more cigar smoke, no more chiming slots, no more stolen luck. A grove of your own, where you can sleep and grow in peace."
The dryad's eyes, once hollow, widened. She looked past him at the leering Leprechauns, then back at Alistair's earnest, dirt-smudged face. She saw no deception, only a shared understanding of what it meant to be out of place.
Her name was Sylvia. And in the silence of her arboreal heart, she made a choice.
She nodded.
It began with a tremor. A deep, grinding shudder in the tiled floor. The ceramic pots containing the trees cracked like eggshells.
"What's he doing?" the lieutenant snarled. "Shoot him!"
But it was too late.
The Enchanted Glen erupted. It wasn't an attack of violence, but one of relentless, natural reclamation. From the floor, thick oak roots, impossibly large, burst upwards, shattering tile and concrete, tripping the Clurichauns and snatching the tommy guns from Leprechaun hands. Ivy vines, thick as pythons, exploded from the walls of fake rock, wrapping around limbs, yanking guards off their feet. From the canopy, the dryads released clouds of shimmering golden pollen that filled the air, not toxic, but profoundly disorienting. Guards stumbled, rubbing their eyes, suddenly forgetting what they were doing, overcome with a deep, placid urge to take a nap in a sunbeam.
Alistair snatched up Kassy and the scabbard. He gave Sylvia one last look. "The satyr at the main valet stand. I'll see to it. Grow well."
He sprinted past a Leprechaun who was gently patting a vine and murmuring about how lovely green was, and burst out of the atrium into the now-chaotic main lobby. The dryad's rebellion was spreading; nearby decorative ferns were growing at visible rates, carpet was sprouting moss, and a topiary unicorn shook its leafy head and trotted off towards the doors.
At the main entrance, a young satyr valet in a green vest was staring, jaw agape, at the interior jungle taking over his workplace.
Alistair skidded to a halt in front of him. He pulled a heavy, platinum credit chip from his pocket—the kind backed by interdimensional gold reserves—and slapped it into the satyr's hoof-like hand.
"You! The dryads in the Glen. When they're free, you get them to Redwood National Park. All of them. Hire a truck, a plane, a dimensional caravan, I don't care. This covers it. See it done." His tone brooked no argument, all easy charm replaced by the authority of a man who made cosmic promises and kept them.
The satyr looked at the chip, then at the raging indoor forest, then at Alistair's intense eyes. He swallowed and nodded fiercely. "Y-yes, sir. Redwood. Got it."
Alistair was already moving, bursting through the main doors—now unguarded, the Clurichauns having fled or been entangled—and into the neon-drenched night. His modified Land Rover Defender was right where he'd left it, its gunmetal gray looking utterly pragmatic amidst the glitter.
He dove into the driver's seat, tossing Kassy and the scabbard onto the passenger side. The engine roared to life with a satisfying, mechanical growl. As he threw it into gear, he glanced up at the Emerald Isle's facade.
High up, on the roof, a massive, fully-formed oak tree was now growing, its roots tearing through the glowing green neon harp. Silhouetted against the Vegas skyline, standing on a thick branch, was Sylvia. She raised a hand, not in farewell, but in benediction.
Alistair grinned, raised a hand in return salute, and peeled out onto the strip, leaving a casino that would never, ever be the same.
Inside the car, Kassy let out a long, metallic sigh. "So. We stole a legendary artifact, destroyed a significant revenue stream for a powerful criminal syndicate, and instigated a botanical insurrection. All in one night. And you didn't even get Aphrodite something shimmery."
"The night is young, Kassy," Alistair said, steering them towards the freeway and away from the glowing chaos. "And I think a free dryad grove is the shiniest souvenir of all."