It turned out that Cai wasn't joking with me, but after he explained more about it to me I realized that what he said wasn't something that happened because it hadn't been tried; it was just so difficult that no one had ever succeeded. Apparently, entire armies within the Wardens of Life had dedicated themselves to killing a planet's Scourge Queen before this and failed. I'll admit, the fact that they failed because they were going after a Queen that had birthed a full swarm was the biggest reason, but that just made my freak accident feel a little cheap to me.

"Rickshaw, you should take the Queen's body and preserve it so that when the Warden shuttles arrive to take you off planet, you can turn it over to the scientists studying the Scourge in all their forms in an attempt to aid in killing them," Cai urged me.

"I'll come back for it," I promised. "Make some sort of note for the area. I can't carry it and the battery."

"Very well, but please be quick," he agreed.

"You know I can't make any promises."

With that strangness taken care of I continued toward the second suspected coffin's location and found another battery. As soon as I saw it, I knew something was going to go very wrong soon and I refused to listen to Cai's constant reassurances. Today was going way to well for my taste; not because I hadn't had good days since coming to this planet, but because literally everything was coming up Rickshaw and when you have to fight alien monsters from time to time, things going as right as all this was just felt like there was another alien around the corner.

Luckily I made it back to my coffin base where I had been able to stay this whole time and drop off the two batteries without a problem. This just made me raise my guard even more. It was on my way back to the Queen I had killed that I finally paid for all the luck I'd had up til now.

"Rickshaw, stealth protocols," Cai's warning snapped me from one state of alert to the other instantly. Stealth protocols were what he had agreed to say when I was approaching a Scourge or group of them that I was certain to die against without preparation. Whenever he warned me, I was to immediately move away from the slight game trail that had been worn into the area by the Scourge and whatever they hunted, I still had never seen whatever that was.

"What are you picking up?" I whispered as I crouched as low to the ground as I could without crawling.

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"It appears that your killing of the young Queen has been discovered," Cai told me. "I am detecting at least three Guardian-type Scourge and all of them are stronger than the Cerberous you fought earlier."

"Should I try to leave and go back to camp?" I asked, still moving away from the beaten path.

"No," Cai's answer actually caught me off-guard a bit.

"You should instead make your way to the west until you come across another AEP. There you should begin to walk south for nine kilometers and turn east until you encounter another AEP. Once there we will wait out the night and only then once we are certain that you have not been followed will we go back to the camp."

I didn't like that I would have to spend the night outside my little shelter, but this seemed like a good way to keep the Scourge Guardians from following me back to my camp and if they did follow me then maybe I'd have enough of a headstart to lose them or seperate them long enough to try taking one out.

Look at me! Just earlier today I was hoping that I'd never run into a Guardian until I was ready to face the Queen and now I was actually trying to prepare myself for the chance I ran into a second one of them today.

The good news was that I made it to the coffin I was staying at tonight without running into trouble. The bad news is that the coffin already had inhabitants of the Scourge variety staying there. The really bad news is that I didn't see them until after I had walked into the small clearing the coffin's impact had created. The really, really bad news was that the Scourge here saw me before I saw them; infact, they were the ones to introduce themselves first. Care to guess how they did that?

That's right, they attacked!

These Scourge were more like ferrets than dogs or even bird-people like the Queen had been. Like the Hellhounds, they had no fur or anything covering their long fleshy bodies and their muscles showed very prominently through their skin. Unlike the Hellhounds, the had no stingers or tentacles to use against me. Instead they just had to make do with their mouths that opened too wide and their claws that extended out as far as my outstretched fingers. And of course I can't forget their eight legs and bodies that easily stretched over seven feet long. They looked like someone had described a ferret to a deeply twisted person who then tried to breed them with crocodiles or something.

The first one was very happy to dash up to me and try to wrap itself around my leg for extra leverage while it climbed my body and went for my throat. I was able to shove my left hand as deep into its mouth as I could so that it started to choke while the other three swarmed us and I went for my sword. The one I was wearing like it was the worst kind of glove kept trying to push itself off my hand, but I wasn't letting that damn thing go until I couldn't use it as a shield anymore, so I doubled down on my grip of something inside its throat and kept twisting around so that it was facing whichever of its buddies were trying to jump at me. They didn't care if they were ripping up me or their friend, they were happy as long as they left long, deep gashes all over the body of whichever one of us it was. I'm glad I was fast enough to keep my meatshield between me and whoever was clawing at me.