“Yes, Master?” Rai asked once he was next to me, having picked up on the seriousness in my voice.

“Once, I told you that information was the key to defeating your enemy. This lesson is one on information gathering, in this case, we want to understand how centaurs work. Sadly, I cannot even begin to guess how their bodies work, the combination of humanoid and horse makes that impossible. So, we will have to learn how their bodies work, by studying them directly.” I began to explain the subject of our lesson, noticing that a couple of wolves were watching us. Maybe they would learn something as well, to me, it was just the same.

“This specimen here is quite useful as it’s death was relatively benign; it has a couple of wounds, especially on what would be the flanks on a horse, but they are rather superficial. Its death came due to a magical attack that simply snuffed out its mind, killing the body in the process.” I gestured to the centaur that had tried to flee. In the time between the battle and the lesson, the body had cooled quite a bit, due to lying in the snow, but it was still warm enough to work as a teaching and learning aid.

Drawing one of my blades, I made sure that the fighting hadn’t chipped or dulled the blades and, to my joy, they were still razor sharp. With a few quick cuts, I stripped the dead body of both clothes and armour, making sure that nothing was in the was of our exploration. I needed to decide how to best go about it, the complete body was large and unwieldy, so, after a moment of contemplation, I decided to work on it in two sections. The obvious separation-point was the joining between humanoid and horse-body, so that was where I started.

“The first question we need to explore is how the joining between humanoid and horse was accomplished. If we look at both parts separately, one would expect that both have a mostly functioning internal system but is that true? I don’t know, but I’m sure we will find out.” I explained to Rai what I was doing, as I started to carefully slice the back of our specimen open, using my blood magic to keep the fluids from blocking our vision. The spine looked like I would have expected from a human, so I kept going, peeling back skin and flesh as I want lower, keeping a running commentary of my findings, mostly where muscles were on the back and how well developed the muscles of our specimen were. It was to be expected; it had been a soldier after all, and using bows and spears during what amounted to cavalry charges needed strong upper-body muscles. My blood magic helped a great deal when it came to finding out how the muscles were oriented and how strong they actually were; even after death had taken away most of the vital essence in the blood, I could still feel and, to a point, manipulate it. Idly, I wondered if there was any way to simulate the bodily processes using magic, essentially producing what amounted to a zombie, just without rotting. A magically animated yet living golem, so to speak. It was a curious idea that I would have to explore with Lenore. But later.

For now, I had exposed the specimen’s spine, down to the joining point, where a human would have their coccyx, only that with the specimen, it wasn’t a vestigial feature, merely an evolutionary leftover, it was the point where the humanoid spine widened and enlarged. The basic features were still the same, a channel of bones that protected a large cord of nerve-fibers within, but the change was obvious. I had no idea what horse-spines would look like, but I could easily imagine that they would be very similar to what I was looking at.

“Sigmir, love, could you lend me your axe?” I asked, needing a tool to separate the spine near the joining-point.

“Sure, here.” She answered, placing the axe into my waiting hand. Using a saw would have been better, less damaging to the specimen, but I simply didn’t have one handy and using one made from Ice would have taken too long. So, using a wedge made from Ice and the flat of the axe as a hammer, I carefully separated the spine, just above the joining-point, leaving that interesting anatomical feature intact.

With the spine separated, I could begin the examine the rest of the body, how it was linked together and how it actually worked.

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My next steps were a little gruesome but sadly necessary, I would have greatly preferred to work on a table or at least with the equipment to easily shift the specimen around, yet, I could only use what I had on hand.

From the separated spine, I started to work my way to the front, cutting and categorizing muscles and organs as much as I could while explaining to Rai what I was finding. And what I was finding was quite interesting. In a human, I would have expected to find the liver and kidney in my work-area, with the intestinal tract nearby but on the centaur, that wasn’t the case. As I cut, I quickly noticed that a large part of the volume was taken up by muscles and some more by four large tubes, one the equivalent to the oesophagus the other the windpipe. Only that, in the centaur, both went down, past what would be the hip in a human, and into the equine body. The other two tubes, if I even wanted to call them that, were the equivalent of the aorta, the major blood vessels. supplying the humanoid body with blood. I made special not to investigate their position, knowing that they might be a major weakness in the centaur’s anatomy.

Once the messy and rather gruesome task of separating the humanoid and the equine-body was done and I had used my Blood Magic to clean the area up, I placed the humanoid body in the snow, before starting to slowly remove skin and flesh, both telling and showing Rai what was where. I was rather surprised when I discovered that the respiratory system was even more curious than I had expected, as it was split. The nostrils were, for some reason, a completely separate system, leading to a pair of lungs in the humanoid chest, right next to an almost disturbingly human heart.

As I continued to slowly and carefully dissect the specimen, I realised what I was looking at. The centaurs had their pulmonary circulatory system and the rest of their circulatory system almost completely separated. There was a connection - it looked almost like a valve between both systems - but otherwise, the heart and the lungs in the humanoid chest were only supplying the head. The rest of the body was supplied using the massive aorta I had discovered when separating the two parts.

I made sure to show Rai where that special valve was, knowing that damaging or even destroying it would likely be as fatal as stabbing someone into their heart. A massive drop in blood-pressure would almost instantly cause unconsciousness, swiftly followed by death.

With the humanoid body reduced to carefully separated parts, the bones stacked nearby and the blood completely drained and disposed off, I focused on the lower body. Sadly, I had little knowledge on equine anatomy, but thanks to my blood magic, I could make some inferences.

Again, I started at the stomach and worked my way in. Getting rid of the fur was rather annoying, it made it harder to see what I was doing, so my first step was to skin as much of it off as I could. In addition, I had Sigmir help me get rid of the legs, telling Rai that we would take a closer look at those later. While they were not as important as vitally important weak points, crippling a centaurs legs would take them out of the fight almost as well as killing them would. But that was for later.

With the fur stripped off, I started following the tubes from above, quickly finding a second, very impressive, set of lungs and a second heart. Sadly, neither of those were in an easily accessible spot, hidden behind strong muscles and an almost impenetrable ribcage, which made attacking them difficult.

Still, I made sure that Rai knew where they were before continuing into the digestive system, soon finding the stomach and the intestines. I mostly left them alone and as intact as I could, not feeling the need to discover more than absolutely necessary, especially as I couldn’t deal with the contents of those as easy as I could deal with blood, meaning that it would be incredibly messy and disgusting.

After getting rid of as much of the digestive tract as I could, I discovered the remaining organs, liver, spleen, kidneys and so on, noticing that some of them were rather exposed and could be damaged, maybe even destroyed, with short blades as the ones Rai and I were using. Sure, it would take a little time for a centaur to bleed out if only their kidney was penetrated but having a spot that would cause them debilitating pain was good, just by itself.

It didn’t take me long to finish the exploration of the equine body and after that, we only had to look at the legs. Those had a couple of weaknesses, mainly near the ankles and I made sure that Rai knew where the major muscles could be separated with relative ease, but there was nothing that made me think it would be an easy target.

“We are done.” I finally told Rai, looking up and noticing that above me, the sky was already dark. I had spent hours on the dissection, luckily, no centaurs had come to disturb us.