“Really?”

  “Yes.’

  “But… really?”

  Scotty looked behind him and called out. “Hey, Bryan. People try to kidnap or fuck with Godkillers all the time, right?”

  Their latest guardian rustled his way through the unusually thick underbrush that Wade had relocated. “She having trouble believing it?”

  “In my defense,” Shilloh said, “his job is to defend the places we live or get our shit imported from.”

  “I mean, yeah, but have you considered that people are dumb?”

  “No one’s that dumb.”

  “You really want to bet on that?”

  She didn’t even hesitate, “Never mind. Never bet against stupid.”

  The bodyguard smiled at her, “Now you’re thinking. Also, don’t bet against greedy. Anyone with power has the potential to be a powerful tool. I mean, you know why Thresher isn’t here to observe these tests, right?”

  “Because he’s a busy dude?”

  Turns out she was wrong. Frost was moderately busy, but the wait before the fight was a deeply boring time. Especially since they wanted to keep the incursion site secret.

  To observe and learn about their newest addition, Thresher would need to be out in the mask, since Frost had alibis placing him somewhere completely different. It would draw too much attention to them if the big bad Godkiller came to watch them personally.

  Sure, there were plenty of decoys wandering around at any point. All with enchanted black clothes and the mask, but there was a difference in the caliber of the various decoy uniforms. Some were clear fakes, only serving as visual red herrings. Others were superb works of magical art, and a huge number of the people here were certified decoys, even Wade and Scotty.

  Her assumption was that they had to be cautious while the number of people here was still small, because it would be easy to tell who was working as a decoy. Their camp was filling up, and it looked like it would host a pretty big battle force.

  At any point in time, an unknown percentage of that number could receive a randomized schedule to don the Godkiller, so that the real one was hard to pin down, in the lead up to the assault. During the assault, everyone would get the tools needed to spot decoys so they weren’t throwing their lives away for sniper bait.

  They would be given tools to identify the real Godkiller in an emergency and during the battle, but until then, you could only go by your intuition.

  Which was why Thresher hadn’t joined them. Most banes developed a pretty reliable intuition if they kept at it long enough.

  “Yeah, most banes get a sense for the real deal after a few years,” Scotty said. ”But there’s not much you can do about it. Some people are just metaphysically bigger.”

  “Okay, we keep talking about risk and doing all this spy stuff, but what specific risks are we talking about? Do we just not want to cause panic, or have someone follow Wade back to his house? How many people are there that would even try something that dumb?”

  Her sorta-boyfriend quickly scanned the surroundings. His will flickered out and kissed the space around them. She felt his power like a wave of low pressure, taking away the tight-fisted grip of reality and replacing its constant squeeze with a will that cared less about consistency and more about compliance with whim.

  “Alright,” he finally said, turning back to her as he stretched and fidgeted with the straps that held weapons to his body almost all the time. “Just had to double check. But, to answer your question: a lot. Lots of people are cocky, young, overconfident, or suicidally committed to a cause. Hell, half of them think they’re the first person to ever think about kidnapping Godkiller and making an easy couple of million because they’re convinced no one else could ever be as bold and innovative as them.”

  “So it’s foreign sabotage and ransom most of the time? That's the motive?”

  He see-sawed his hand back and forth. “Ehh. Kidnap is definitely the most common. I’ve heard rumors that we lost four or five Godkillers in the early days before our security really hit its stride. They were taken and forced to fight for other powerful factions.”

  She felt a chill run across her arms and back.

  Scotty saw her expression and nodded. “Situationally powerful is Godkilelrs whole deal. It makes them pretty juicy targets. Plus, if you put a collar on someone like Wade, then you save millions of dollars. Just think about how expensive a missile defense system would be. Especially if you actually had to use it regularly.”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Wade scowled. “You also can’t blackmail or torture the encrypted firing key out of a missile.”

  “What the fuck,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up. I think at least one of those old Godkillers was ransomed back, but the others needed military intervention so they could be recovered or killed if they were about to do serious harm.”

  “Are you trying to give me depression? What the actual fuck. They were killed for being kidnapped.”

  To her shock, Wade wasn’t annoyed or offended. He also wasn’t relaxed per-say—even he wasn’t that jaded—but more than anything, his expression just spoke of quiet resolve. “We’re all ready to die for the cause. And we all know that, in exchange for becoming this powerful, there are forces in place that won’t ever stop keeping an eye on us. Won’t stop, making sure we stay on the straight and narrow.”

  “Does that mean my promotion packet might come with a dedicated kill squad? Jesus, that sounds absolutely terrible.”

  “You’ll get it when you see Thresher. That much power can’t be left just around for just anyone to use.”

  “You sure? I’ve touched the pulsing veins of Mother Nature herself, and I don’t think anyone should make a bomb to kill her.”

  Wade looked uncomfortable, ”Maybe you’re right. Anyway, kidnapping is by far and away the most common of the competent attempts.”

  She groaned. Since they seemed to be done with training, she stood up and started her cooldown routine by touching her toes. As if summoned, Fraulein appeared out of the woods, this time with a very large body, and rubbed against her, joyously interrupting Shilloh’s stretching as any cat would.

  “I don’t like that there are enough attempts that we have to categorize them.”

  Scotty stood up and started stretching, too. “There was actually a minute where Wade and I tried to make a system for sorting the death threats. But there were just too many.”

  “Yeah,” the Were said. “After a few months, I asked to be given fewer updates on them in our security briefings. The details were too much of a bummer.”

  Shilloh thought back to what it felt like to have a yelling man in her space, or to see someone walking behind her for too long. It made her shiver. “How can you be so casual about that? It’s a threat on your life.”

  Wade smiled as the lynx wandered over to him for attention. “Scotty told me something. What was it you said?”

  “I said it was just math. Shilloh, think about the population of Texas. How many people in Texas would you bet have some form of psychosis, delusion, are off their meds, or are just angry enough to threaten someone?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Would you say tens of thousands?”

  “Maybe. Probably less.”

  “I don’t agree, but let’s roll with it. Now, I don’t know the actual population of Texas, but do you think that at least half of them have heard of Godkiller?”

  “Absolutely. Nine out of ten people are probably more likely.”

  “Then there you have it. Just by sheer chance, we can conservatively say that half to nine-tenths of those ten thousand people who are suffering from some form of mental illness may latch onto Godkiller and decide that he’s actually a secret cyborg from the future trying to put nanobots in their skim milk. Obviously, that means they must eliminate him for the sake of humanity.”

  “And,” Wade said, “that's not a made-up example. Someone sent a death threat to the Blightbanes with that exact justification. Knowing many of these ‘threats’are just random chance makes it easier to deal with. It’s not really about me, it’s about them. There are lots of dumb kids who are angry about the system, or conspiracy theorists who want to let off steam.”

  That actually made sense to her. Volunteering at an old person’s home had let her see what deteriorative mental illnesses could look like. They were very unpredictable. And some of the people who needed memory care weren’t terribly old.

  “I get it, I just keep having trouble thinking about how someone could be so selfish that they would want to kill Godkiller.”

  Wade shrugged, “There are deities who push their worshipers to help cryptos that will damage their competitors, even if it will kill many of their own.”

  Scotty chimed in, “Plenty of warlords only think about how they could abuse power even more if the government wasn’t there to stop them.”

  “Until they run out of antibiotic shipments to steal,” Shilloh said, not really protesting, just needing to vent the sense of helpless rage at the idiocy of it all.

  “There’s also regular run of the mill apocalyptic-cults of all sorts.”

  “Existential fear isn’t an excuse to be dumb.”

  He opened his mouth, but she held up her hand, “Stop. I know you’re right. Great way to smash a military base. There are also people who will believe everything is a conspiracy, or that you’re really the monsters and are enforcing inequity and scarcity for some convoluted reason. Let’s just move on, I don’t want to think about Flat Eathers or any other conspiracy stuff, it makes me sad.”

  “Fair enough, suffice it to say, ignorance, greed, zealotry, run-of-the-mill insanity, or just a feeling that they could get some sort of short-term business profit if their competitors' quarters were crushed, leads to all sorts of problems.”

  She grumbled something that would have gotten her grounded when she was a child.

  Wade laughed, “Oh, an absolute smorgasbord of mother fuckers, you’re right. The point is, the secrecy actually has a point. Could be hostile governments, international crime organizations, or just a cult of crypto worshipers trying to put in a good word. Either way, it all ends up being pretty much the same for us.”

  With that, he stood up and offered her a hand.

  “What about this monster?” she said, taking his hand and letting him haul her up to her feet. ”Does it have a cult? Do we have to worry about that while we fight?”

  Wade gently kissed her knuckles, holding them longer than strictly necessary. “A small one. We took care of them ages ago. Their seer is actually how we knew to have me set up a mark here?”

  “So we know what we’re facing?”

  Wade grinned, “We do, and, lucky you, this one comes with a bonus horde included. That's why Thresher is here. He only gets to play when there is significant ‘crowd control’ for him to draw power from.”

  Shilloh narrowed her eyes, not liking the glee in his face. “When you say crowd control…”

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