I rushed out of the pod with my combat spur in my right hand, raised and ready to strike at the alien menace Dumbass had guaranteed would be waiting to strike me down like an angry young Jedi. On my left wrist I wore my pal Drumstick's bracer, and from my palm projected the same glowing blue shield of energy he had used against me before I lopped his head off and stuck it in my backpack. The ersatz light reflected off the cloud of moon dust propelled into the air by the impact of my drop pod, giving me the impression I was once again swimming in the clear blue waters of my favorite pond.

With a swallow, I pushed aside the sense of longing that welled inside me like a wave on a windy day, and focused on the fear of the uncertain—that some new, even more bizarre creature was lurking out there that wanted to end me just as much as I wanted to end it.

“Hey Dumbass,” I said, my nervousness slipping into the fringes of my voice. “Any sign of—”

New Milestone: Court Is In Session!

Congratulations, criminal! Despite all your lollygagging around and not having a permanent mailing address, you’ve actually made it to Court on time! And partially prepared, too! But soiled jean shorts, man? I guess courtroom decorum isn’t high on your priority list. Well, at least they can’t convict you of crimes against chickenkind for being a poorly dressed moron. Your crime, you ask? Unpaid taxes! The penalty? Death! While you’ve been floating in space getting used to your half-human body, the prosecution has done their homework and is ready to take this thing to trial. The only problem is, you have to make it through a few of your fellow accused before you can really defend your innocence. Sounds like a blast, doesn’t it?

I furrowed my brow. “Duck no, it doesn—”

New Milestone: Trial by Combat!

Way to go, Earthman… er, Earthduck… er, Earthduckman! You are one of the privileged few blessed with the opportunity to win their innocence in a literal Trial by Combat, and the first ever from the podunk Class M planet you call home. Yes, dummy, that means you’re one of the billions of beings to face the Trials since the chickens and dinosaurs started going at it in the not-fun way oh so many years ago, and maybe you’ll be one of the even fewer number to come out of the ordeal alive and innocent. Not likely, but maybe. And to be clear, that number is very, very, small.

Main Quest Begun: Survive

I mean, the title is pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think? You survive, you live. You don’t; you die. Damn, I feel like I’m making this more confusing than it needs to be here. How about we go with the Cliff Notes version: Don’t ducking die duck.

New Quest: The Best Offense is a Good Defense

You didn’t think we’d let you go at this alone, did you? Most smart people hire an attorney for this kind of thing. And since we’ve already established that you’re not smart, it pains me to point out you're literally a sitting duck about to get hit in the head by... crap, my timing was off. We’re gonna have to try this again. Just, um, sit tight for a second, okay?

Finally able to get a reprieve from the onslaught of notifications going off inside my head, I rolled my eyes and said, “Don’t die. Got it. Thanks for the heads up, Captain Obvious.”

You're welcome!

I blew out a held breath and moved my left hand behind me to cover my flank as I took a tentative step forward into the haze of the cavern. Treading as light as possible, I snapped my neck around to check the space behind the drop pod for Dumbass’s guaranteed bad guy and saw nothing. I mean, as far I knew, I saw nothing. The room was cloudier than a rave with a haywire fog machine. “Hey, Dumbass? Are you sure that I’m not just going to be alon—”

Something hit me in the back of the head with hollow punk! sound. The noise and the impact made it feel like the mean kid in gym class had just kicked a soccer ball at my back when I wasn’t looking. That kind of made me sad because it implied I was the kid that got picked last or something. I knew that was bullshit, on account of never having been in gym class, but that it was the first thing that came to my mind bothered me. Maybe that Russell Crowe guy had gotten picked on in gym class or something? But, I didn’t seem to have any of his memories, so that was unlikely.

Before I could dwell on it any longer, I got pegged right square in the face. It hurt like hell, sending a flurry of stars soaring into my vision. The only upside was that I saw the thing flying right for my noggin this time and, while it was soccer ball shaped, the damn thing looked like a person who didn't know how to sew had pieced together with the leftover bits from Buffalo Bill’s skin suit.

A rush of whizzing air let me know another one was inbound. And since I knew what I was looking for now, I raised my shield to block the ball as it flew right towards the center of my chest. And wouldn’t you know it? Another notification ran on auto-play, catching me so off guard I nearly shat my pants again as the space ball collided with my chest and sent me reeling backwards.

Quest Completed: The Best Offense is a Good Defense Part 1

Even a sitting duck is in the right spot once a day. Consider this pushover of a quest my Trials opening gift to you. It’s going to affect my quest incompletion percentage, but I deserve it for mistiming a perfectly good quip.

Your quest completion has spawned a Common Loot Cache in the immediate area.

New Quest: The Best Offense is a Good Defense Part 2

Yeah, so I said you weren’t in this alone, remember? As a piss-poor set of wings and thighs that is almost guaranteed to wind up as duck confit in the future, you’re still entitled to a legal defense. I know, I know. The crazy Gallic legal system is almost civilized in some ways. And yes, there is a catch. Unlike Earth, your public defender isn’t going to strategize with you during a cozy jail visit. Find yours inside the Trials, and you better hope that the good ones aren’t already taken. I’d get my watertight ass in gear if I were you.

“Watertight ass? Really?”

Yes. It is the truth… unless… water gets in yours? Does… it?

“No!” I paused for a second, then stared up towards no one in particular and shouted, “Are you ducking done?!”

Yes. For now.

“Thank dog!” I sighed. “How about a little help here, Dumbass? Any idea what these balls are and where they’re coming from?”

“Yeah, not really. There are, like, thousands of species that were incorporated into the Gallic Galactic Conquest, and at least a hundred fight with some kind of combat ball, and that's even touching the surface of the number that play with them. Like sports balls. Not... balls balls. Although, balls balls are fairly universal, dimorphically speaking, so I guess ball obsession covers most of the known galaxy—not like Idiocracy-type obsession with balls, that’s only humans but… but… but from the muscle twitches on your face I can sense this isn’t anywhere near the information you’re looking for so I’m going to turn this on now that we're inside the Combat Area and shut up.”

A gray square appeared in the lower right corner of my vision, and at the center was a bright white delta.

“Dumbass, how is a square with half a dozen red dots supposed to...” I trailed off as I realized what I was looking at. It was a map. A mini-map, like in a video game. And I was the delta at the center. Those six red dots around me? I knew enough to know they represented hostiles. Bad guys. Antagonists. And not just one, like Dumbass had guaranteed, but six. Six ducking aliens were in this cavern with me, and they were all swarming around me, throwing balls at me like we were going to settle who gets the loot cache I had spawned by playing space dodgeball.

There was another whizz of air as a ball flew at me, and I just raised my shield in time to deflect it away with a thunk!

“You useless pile of circuits!” I snapped. “Dumbass, you guaranteed one bad guy! One! Not six! One!”

“Hehe… yes, I did. But in my defense, I was making what we smart sapients call an educated guess. How do I put this so that your duck brain can understand? Aha! Unlike out in the rest of the world, there are, um, let’s call them jamming devices that limit my access to certain information from the simulation. So I made my best assessment of the situation based on the information I had and my knowledge of how these kinds of things have played out in past Trials.”

I dodged another ball. “Well, you guessed wrong. And that’s the second time you’ve said that. Simulation. The implication behind that scares me, and we are gonna talk about it later. But in case you haven’t noticed, I'm getting attacked by ducking skin balls. So why don't you pony up, act like the Azor Ahai you think you are, stop telling what you can’t do and help a brother out?”

“Um, they already make most sports balls of skin, genius.” Dumbass sighed. “But fine. And only because that was a badass reference. Me, the Prince that was Promised. Or maybe Princess? What's the neutral? Princette? I dunno. I haven't decided which way I want to go yet. You know, pronouns and all?”

"Call yourself cotton candy for all I care," I growled. “You are still the most useless, sorry excuse for a game guide I have ever—”

“Flap, shut up and listen. You need to learn to use the tools that I can give you. This space cave is hazy enough to make fighting by sight difficult, so watch the mini-map. The mini-map will give the attacks away. Trust the mini-map.”

It was hard to put my faith in a computer that was always skipping out on doing its job, but I bit the bullet and focused on the map. And just like Dumbass had said, I saw the beginning of an attack. One dot vibrated like it had found that funny smelling back massager your mom keeps in her bedside drawer. Then it shot in my direction as if it had been fired out of a cannon.

I took a step back to buy myself a split second more of reaction time, then swung my combat spur, cleaving the ball in two. There was a screech of death as the halves clattered against the far wall. Then I received a notification telling me they had awarded me something experience points.

“Yeah, that’s right,” I grunted. “Uncle Flappy came to play ball.”

“Please don’t call yourself Uncle Flappy again. The viewers might get the… wrong idea about you.”

“Viewers? What view—” I deflected a ball with my shield and looked at the map. Now all of the remaining dots were vibrating like car with bulging tires, save for one.

“We can worry about that later,” said Dumbass. “You got more important things on your plate now.”

A low hum emanated from around me, then four of the balls on my map rolled away. The hum shifted pitch into an eerie multi-voiced harmony, then erupted into a feedback-like shriek that would have made Hendrix proud.

The feathers on the back of neck shot up as the dots shot at me almost instantaneously from all directions. I raised my shield and deflected two, then hacked another in half, spewing strangely fruity smelling blood onto my face. There was a hint of bitterness, but it slightly sweet, almost like the cranberry jelly you get at Thanksgiving dinner. Not that I ever been at Thanksgiving dinner, or anything. The stuff tasted so ducking good. I couldn’t help it, so I licked the rest of it off my bill. Weird, I know, but I hadn’t eaten anything other than chicken feed and this stuff really hit the spot.

While the alien jelly distracted me from you know, defending myself, the last ball drove into my lower back, and unlike the first couple of hits, this one didn’t bounce off. The creature bit into the meat of my shoulders, sending a shock wave of pain through my upper torso. I reached my hand behind, grabbed a hold of something that was very much not ball shaped and squirming like it was alive, then threw it to the ground and stomped down with all my might. There was a slight delay before the creature popped like an egg under the pressure and covered my webbed foot with shell and goo.

“Coming from behind you!” Dumbass warned. “And in front of you! Shit! Um… duck?”

I did not duck. I had a better idea. Instead, I spun around to meet the attack while I held my shield facing the other way, and I almost made it all the way around before my gooey foot slipped and I went crashing to the ground with a thud.

The two balls collided in the air right above my head, cracking both open and spraying that magical tasting goo all over my head. I wiped it away the best I could, licked my hand clean, and checked my map. All the dots gone except for one.

And that last one? It wasn’t moving.

I stood up to look around and as I did so, a light shone down on me from above, bathing the cavern in blistering white. After blinking my eyes several times to adjust my vision to the new fake sun overhead, I said, “You doing that, Dumbass?”

“Nah, that’s just the holocam drone. Anyway, let’s find this last rascal, poke him with that sharp chicken finger of yours until he’s dead, find the loot cache, and get the hell out of here. We have to keep moving.”

“I’m going to ignore you not telling me space paparazzi would follow me around for now, and focus on the most important question. Just what in the hell were those things and why is the last one not doing anything?”

“For one, use the tools that I gave you, Flap. Scan the ducking corpse and answer your own questions. For two, who cares?”

I shook my head and mumbled, “I feel like I'm living with a magic eight ball that only has bad answers,” then I turned my vision towards one corpse. A tooltip popped up, along with an animated three-dimensional render of what the thing looked like, before I sliced it in half. It was a toddler sized version of those pill bugs I used to find near my pond, shifting between standing and then rolling into those plated balls that had been trying to kill me mere moments ago.

Weepletikmursum

Level 1 Curculian

The inaccurately named Curculians are a semi-hive minded species that comes from the planet Curculia. Curculian culture is so bland, homogenous, and boring that the Cluck Collective has practically erased its existence out of annoyance. Any Gallic scholar will tell you it was because their high base defense and the ability to coordinate through their hive mind was a threat to the Gallic Galactic Conquest, but in truth, it's just that they are so annoyingly bland. That and the goo inside the exoskeleton of a Curculian tastes like grandma’s homemade fruit preserves to fowl folk. You should know, you rubbed what was left of this gal into your gums like the last bit of nose candy in the baggie. If it makes you feel better for eating what amounts to an endangered species, think of Curculia as the galaxy’s Gary, Indiana. Weepletikmursum is—sorry, was—one of six remaining members of her species.

I know they were trying to kill me and all, but as I looked around at the cracked and oozing corpses of the Curculians I had just killled, I felt sick to my stomach. They were the last of their species, like me—at least until I could save Earth. And I had slaughtered them without a second thought.

“Alright, let’s get this show on the road. Rest stop is over and the lot lizards are coming out.” Dumbass grunted. “And Curculians are worthless. Find the last one and kill it.”

Dumbass's comment felt wrong for some reason. Not out of character, just cold. Calculating. I scanned the room, looking for the endling I had just created. Not to kill like Dumbass wanted. There had to be some reason the thing didn’t attack like the rest, and I wanted to find out why.

A muffled grunt from under my drop pod was my first hint at that answer. I rushed over and pushed on the man-sized tube of metal with all my strength. At first, it didn’t move. But as I drove my webbed feet into the rubble, it slowly toppled over. The pod collided with the ground, sending out a hollow ring throughout the cavern they echoed far longer than felt right.

And when I looked down into the small crater beneath, I saw a brown, armor plated ball about as big around a fuel drum lying still in the regolith. I leaned in close and prodded the thing with a finger, not sure where the ass ended and the head began. Then I scratched my head, not quite sure of what to do next.

I didn't have to think for long. The ducking thing sprung open and leaped at me right as turned my head, dozens of clawed arms stretching out to grab me like wriggling sand worms.