With Cai's revelation that I would have to kill the Scourge Queen on this planet flying through my mind like a child after too much candy, I attempted to get some sleep. If you've ever tried to sleep after getting some bad news, you probably know why I found myself staring at the ceiling of the shelter nearly ten hours later and wondering if maybe I should go back to the desperate idea that this was just a really weird dream.

Too bad this was one dream that wouldn't end.

When I finally gave up on trying to sleep, I tried to make a plan for what I would need to do to gather the remaining pieces needed to finish my escape plan and what I might need to do to actually do something that seemed impossible; kill a Scourge Queen.

The first thing I needed to do was become more familiar with the suit the Wardens of Life had fitted me with. That was easy enough; after a quick talk with Cai, the only thing I didn't know about the suit was that it could in fact create a totally sealed environment and had thrusters to help me move underwater or in space. No secret mech for me I guess.

The second thing I thought to do was try to learn to use my sword the way it was meant to be used. I managed against the Hellhounds, but I know that was way more luck than anything. Something I remembered from my weird coworker back home was that swinging a sword like a club is stupid. He was always telling me how three inches shoved into a chest can do the same as an eight inch cut. Although he was gay and may have thought he was hitting on me so, I don't know.

The point is that I had no idea what I was doing and I needed to learn. Cai was very helpful in that regard. At least after we managed to set up the rocks I was supposed to use for my footwork; apparently that was important but I had no idea one way or the other.

After starting sword lessons with my disembodied AI buddy to critique me, I started part three of my plan; scouting. With Cai's ability to use the coffin's body to boost his signal, we were able to constantly check for any Scourge in a thirty kilometer radius. Given that the Queen was only twenty-five kilometers away, there was always at least ten Scourge signals that came back to Cai. Luckily for me, most of those signals roamed about and seemed to avoid the area I had landed at, so that meant I had a base camp right in the middle of their whole territory. Knowing what directions those signals grouped together in was very helpful for scouting the terrain I was in. I think that's something soldiers do; I was going off about as much information as the Wardens were when they sent me down here. Thanks Internet.

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The last thing I needed to do was come up with a way to kill the Queen. Simple, right? Wrong. According to Cai and everything the Wardens knew about Scourge Queens, they were some of the few Scourge that had armor, which made it seem like suicide to go after it with my sword, and they were never alone. Each Queen had at least five guardian Scourge near them at all times and those Scourge were always changing. Each time the Queen birthed a new clutch of them, the weakest guardian would take the young Scourge away and a stronger Scourge would become the new guardian.

To get around that, I settled on the idea that would have made my cousin jump for joy; a bomb. Cai told me that I could make one using more batteries from dead coffins and some excess wiring from life support systems. I just needed to get them and try not to go out like my uncle.

Since most of my ideas needed those damn batteries and wiring, I made sure to look for them while I was out scouting, or at least trying not to fall on my face if I ever had to run away. Luckily, excepting the first one where I got the comms box, I found nearly twenty of the crashed coffins in a close area. If any of them had been functioning then Cai would have found them or their signal when I first landed, since none of them were he concluded that "the odds of survivors and aid from them was miniscule and improbable as well as unlikely." His words.

Not every coffin had an intact battery or life support system, but I was able to scrape about ten batteries together before I had to risk looking through the eight that were in Scourge heavy areas. Those needed some extra planning for and ran the biggest risk of danger.

And that's how I found myself, nearly three weeks after waking up and falling out of the sky, facing down a my next Scourge opponent. A Guardian.