I got a lesson on goblin warfare while we traveled for another year toward the peninsula.

We fought two goblin locust-hordes. Comparing a goblin horde to a locust swarm is an oxymoron. There's no other term to explain tens of thousands of greenskins devastating everything in their path and leaving a carpet of shit behind them. Worse, they don't surrender. For a goblin, so long there are at least a few other goblins to their sides they think they can switch places with and escape, they have the same morale as fanatical zealots. The standard tactic to deal with these little conniving cowards is to divide and conquer. Pinch a bit of the horde away, beat it until they rout while keeping the rest at bay. Rinse, repeat.

Their cowardly nature means they don't charge, because of course if a goblin runs to attack a stronger enemy, the other goblins will run slightly slower to let the idiot that wants to go first die. The Nash Equilibrium for their rush forward is a tip-toe advance as the goblins behind the unlucky ones in the frontline poke and push these to go ahead, side-by-side. Centaurs can cordon a huge goblin horde with just a few dangerous-looking individuals while you split and finish some of them. In some ways, the goblin hordes act like mindless slimes.

I heard that strategy goes out the window when it comes to goblin hordes led by a [Goblin Lord] or a [Goblin King], as these species-specific Classes have Perks that allow them to force the horde to move as they want. When one of these arose in the plains, the centaurs do not engage. They flee and run to warn as many bands as possible, abandoning the slower centaurs to their doom to later gather as many tribes as they can to squash the horde and kill the goblin chieftain.

And to boot it all, goblins are all [common] rarity and pick [common] Classes because the vast majority of these lazy-ass bums don't do anything to qualify for any other Classes. That is a boon to the greenskin pests because they grow up fast with the rank and rarity bonuses when they manage to kill something, but a curse to everyone else because they are worth crap when you kill one.

It's no wonder the wandering tribes don't treat goblins as people, more like a calamity you can push toward those you don't like. They don't trade with goblins because goblins don't have anything worth trading and the spoils they get are soon spoiled, rusted, chewed on, or shat over. Or all of the above in any which order the ignoble vermin think of.

Just from hearing the tales, the herd spoke about goblins when preparing to fight the hordes and during the aftermath of the battles made me loathe the goblinoid blight with all my being.

Yeah, I was becoming each day more like the savages of the plains. Rawr!

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I smelled the ocean surf and fought to keep the nostalgia back. Princess Arista sacrificed herself to make sure her Kingdom would be safe for thousands of years. I was Snowdrop the centaur, a barbarian in the land of barbarians. Crom!

We were close to the peninsula now. By "close" I meant a few weeks away. The vegetation changed along with the terrain. We now walked over rocky, sandy, and dry terrain with plenty of succulent and cactus plants, along with palm trees, some tough grass, and other sturdy, seaside vegetation. The reason for this change was obvious. The elevation gradient here was very low, and oceanic storms and tsunamis could push the seawater to cover miles and miles of terrain. When the water went away, the sand and salt remained behind, only to be washed back to the ocean by the rain.

Vegetation that required a more stable environment couldn't thrive here. It also meant that people tribes that couldn't efficiently use the resources avoided this region. Also, this place was the sacred grounds of all centaur tribes, where they prayed to Zacheia for a strong mate. It was the only time I heard of another deity than Queltphion.

Anecdotes told by those that sought this place called it the broodmare peninsula. Or the love peninsula. Detractors called it something else that has to do with horse breeding with tons of expletives I won't commit to prose. The real name vanished or never existed, to begin with.

It was the place I was conceived and the place our herd returned to, to... well, conceive more.

To prevent inbreeding, the centaur herds kept track of which herds they cross-mated with previously. Don't repeat a mate-herd? Sorry, polite terms are hard to come by. Don't repeat a herd very often, and boom, you got genetic diversity in your herd and healthy warriors. Centaurs knew who their mother was and probably the grandmothers and so on, as the females stayed with their herd, but fathers? Nope, unless people had very good memory or for bragging rights, your father was a renowned Centaur, like Enantinos. But grandfathers and beyond were things we didn't even have a word for.

Even so, being the spawn of a renowned stallion had problems of its own, as the expectations usually didn't match what the System gave the sons and daughters of great centaurs. There were no dynastic rules, so no cheap titles and rare classes for the inexistent centaur royalty or nobility.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Every adult was required to find a mate. Failure to do so meant exile. Because if you couldn't find a single female in the other herd willing to take you for a one-nighter - joke's on the sky because nineteen hours out of every day was night - you were a failure and something to be discarded.

Worse yet, these failures were discarded on the far side of the plains. Without a band, they wandered the sandy beaches and became hermits in the far southeast. Some of them might even become powerful wizards if you catch my drift. [1]

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At this point one might ask, what about the females? Could they refuse a mate? Yeah... Let me slow-clap my hands and frown in dismay. It was a question I eagerly sought the answer for too.

Barbarians, remember?

They didn't have universal suffrage, democracy, free market, human rights (snicker, human rights. So speciesist!), enlightenment, and particularly, very few female rights. A numerous herd is a strong herd and to get more centaurs in your herd they needed to be birthed from somewhere. So, an individual had a resource that could help the herd grow strong and would dare REFUSE to make use of it? Preposterous.

All females of breeding age were required to mate. Sometimes several times to make sure they would conceive. There were shamans here in the peninsula that offered fertility concoctions of dubious origins but unerring efficacy.

Maybe some of these shamans were the wizards christened at the edge of the peninsula. Who knows?

But I knew enough chemistry and alchemy to recognize a potent magical hormonal bomb. A female that took it was guaranteed to ovulate. Not that they knew what ovulation was.

The mares and fillies didn't need it though. I could swear they were ovulating out of sheer excitement. They made bets as to who would take the other herd's chieftain for a partner and also how many partners each would take during our visit.

That last tidbit made me wonder, maybe those doomed to follow the path of sand wizardry and candlelight dinners with sea cucumbers really deserved it.

My mom was ready to join in the tango as well. After fighting with Eathelin during the "sandbank prisoners love revolution", I knew better than to dictate what my current mother should do with her fanny. I just pretended to be a child and braced my four hooves to weather the storm.

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The herds met, the centaurs flirted. Which in their quasi-neolithic culture meant the males flexed and did feats of strength while the females batted their eyelids and picked their partners on a first-come-first-humped [2] basis.

I stayed at the back of the herd with the elders that weren't in breeding age anymore. They had dozens of children already and they are worth to the tribe was as walking repositories of knowledge. And as babysitters. Guess the two jobs match when they talked to us about centaur history, as seen through the lens of great feats of strength. And even the elders were ripped. Remember, people in Yznarian suffer little to no decline in their Status in old age until they hit their twilight years.

But on one hoof, I passed the trials and was an adult. On the other hoof, I was about two years old and obviously not of reproductive age. On the third hoof, I beat the trial in the hardest difficulty. On the fourth hoof, centaurs were braggarts. And petty when they wanted to.

It was the petty ones, the youngsters that failed their trials, the ones giving me the stink-eye back in the Abode of War, that went and ratted their teeth to the other herd. I was there, playing "raid the human village" - the game was exactly as anyone would imagine, with one side being the "humans" and the other the "raiders" fighting - with the other foals, all of us laughing, hurting from our bruises, and having a jolly barbarian time when chieftain Enantinos approached with another centaur about just a few fingers shorter and thinner than our leader.

"So, that white one was the one blessed by Queltphion?" The newcomer outsider asked, rudely pointing at me and frowning.

"Indeed she is," Enantinos, who previously wished to keep me hidden, said proudly. Now that the charade was off, he would boast about his herd's prowess. "However, as you can see, she's too young."

The other centaur clopped his left hoof, a kind of nervous tic that indicated the centaur in question was not willing to buy bullshit from the other. After all, centaur manure was just as good and all of them were very able to make it on their own.

"The customs are clear. If she passed the trial, she is an adult. If she is an adult, she must pick a mate."

One of the elders rose from where he sat watching the children play and ready to intervene if one of the "raiders" got too violent with the "humans" - for some reason the weaker centaurs were also the unlucky two-legged weaklings - and approached the two chieftains.

"She is not of breeding age. Even if you intoxicate her with the shaman's concoctions, she will not get a foal in her womb. Why bother?"

I knew we were screwed when I saw greed flash in the eyes of the visiting chieftain. "It doesn't matter. My herd is entitled to mating with her, and I wouldn't pass the opportunity of such a rare specimen."

Let the records show he wasn't sultry or horny. It was more like a rancher talking about livestock. I was well aware that that nuance added another, different layer of insult to the injury.

I kept pretending I didn't understand what they were saying as I punched one "human" defender in the stomach. He kicked my front hoof and bit my arm, then I slapped his ear to send him spinning on the sand. Why can't these "humans" just lie down and let themselves be raided? Was it too hard to understand?

"See? She's ferocious enough even at this age. Let her with my herd, once she gives birth to the first foal we'll return her," the other chieftain proposed.

I had only myself to blame for roleplaying the fierce barbarian raider in front of the rancher guy.

"That's not our customs!" The elder centaur retorted. "Females do not abandon their herd!"

Rancher guy slapped the elder, sending him spinning on the sand.

That was it. Time to go feral.

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[1] : https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-virgin-wizard

[2]: I originally used the F-word, but why be crass when the language is so rich?