I had been told that there was a certain secret underbelly of the SHOT Show for Monster Hunters. Many of the companies in the gun and gear business knew about us and loved us because we had lots of money and burned through equipment rapidly. So if you wore your company logo or managed to talk to the right sales rep at the right place, you could get peeks behind the curtains at the good stuff that wasn’t available to the public. With hundreds of us from around the world all converged here, that meant there would be even more super-secret cool-guy stuff to play with. Plus, Milo had told me that there were usually tons of free samples.

As a lifelong gun nut, this news had made my year, and I was so excited to make it over to the SHOT Show that I could taste it. I had already color-coded a map with companies that I needed to hit up, and I had even built a spreadsheet for all of the things we needed to buy. Guns, ammo, new types of armor to experiment with, knives, explosives, and Milo really wanted a killer robot.

Unfortunately, since I was now management, protocol demanded that I put in some face time at ICMHP first. So here I was, map, spreadsheet, and purchase orders ready to go, and I was roped into attending the opening ceremonies instead. Acres of guns calling my name right across the street, and I was stuck schmoozing.

Now, there were plenty of panels I did want to attend, though most of those were scheduled in the evenings. I couldn’t wait to hear the nitty-gritty about some of the rare types of monsters that had been encountered and what had proved most effective in destroying them. There was even a Q&A session for the team that had taken down the infamous Glasgow mega-snake. They could keep the laws and ethics nonsense panels. I was in this for the things that would make me a more effective Hunter. The last thing I wanted to do was listen to a lobbyist for equal rights for vampires or some bullshit like that.

After Julie and I had come down the elevator, we signed in, got name tags, and were hustled through the registration area of the Last Dragon’s conference area. There were all sorts of attendees, academics, lobbyists, salesmen, government types, but mostly Hunters, more Hunters than I’d ever seen, Hunters from all over the world. Hell, according to Julie this was the greatest concentration of Hunters anyone knew of. None of us were dressed for battle and nobody was wearing their war face, but you could tell they were Hunters. You could just smell it on them. These people had seen things that even I hadn’t seen. It was kind of exciting, yet also strangely intimidating, and for the first time I felt myself becoming really excited for this event.