Goblins were the equivalent of toddler sized locusts.

  There wasn’t a better descriptor I could ascribe to the green harbingers of calamity. Normally they roamed the edges of society, killing what cattle they could and scurrying off to their hovels where I assumed they feasted like rats.

  One glaring problem with that though, my village wasn’t on the edge of society. It was firmly between two grand cities where plenty of merchant caravans would cross on their way to one or the other.

  So their presence there? A tell tale sign of a horde, thousands upon thousands of gremlins terrorizing a patch of land until whatever causes the frenzy ceased. No one knew how a horde started, or where goblins came from, they just seemingly…appeared. From nowhere.

  In the game that was all fine and dandy, who needed a fucking explanation? All monsters just spawned and that was that. Infinite monsters! Fun little mechanic to abuse if one wanted to farm experience and didn’t have a life, but otherwise there wasn’t an explanation to be found. That wasn't how it worked for the actual monsters of this world, each had their own unique methods of coming to the world.

  Diods were giants without skin, and they arose from the bellies of dead mammals as a kind of parasite. Chimeras were the product of a very specific kind of witch. Dollmen come from a mana stone condensed enough to create a walking mimicry of the human form. Scalewolves just fucked.

  Those were some of the species nearby, but the principle remained consistent. Each had an origin, or at least a made up one where people bullshitted their way into making it make sense. Goblins though? They just came from nowhere. Nowhere at all.

  Bipedal bastardization of the human form. They may be in possession of a brain, and have the capacity to utilize rudimentary weaponry, but holy shit were they stupid.

  No tactics beyond a horde, no thought beyond the next meal. Their survival instincts were non-existent, where an animal would flee, they keep going. It was to the point where I was pretty sure their idiocy was a product of the game rather than anything logical.

  Still, when they did manage to form a horde, they posed a credible threat to farm and country. So, needless to say, the empire didn’t quite tolerate green-skins in their territory. There was a standing bounty for anyone willing to hunt them, and the army got sent to eradicate whatever horde had managed to form with extreme prejudice.

  That last part I found out the day before when Patan was sent out as a runner to inform the city. No one had any doubt that the magisters would sacrifice a few battalions to deal with the issue, even with the presence of just a few of the fuckers spotted in the village.

  I didn't know much about imperial customs beyond what I was raised in. The game took place entirely in the princess’s kingdom, with imperials only showing up as invaders in the first portion of the game. A kind of tutorial phase for the horrors to come, as though the game were somehow complicated.

  So yeah, Patan should have the army coming round to commit a green genocide. A little extreme, but it made sense to nip it in the bud early. Goblins could cause mass destruction if left unchecked.

  The worst part of a horde wasn’t even the goblins! It was the orc that came with it, or orcs, if you were really unlucky. Orcs were, ostensibly, stronger than Grand Knights. A Grand Knight could flatten a village like mine, all on their lonesome. It’d be a challenge for sure, but still flattened. Some orcs even had titles based on their exploits of past hordes, traipsing through the empire with their murder parades.

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  With all that said, I couldn’t help but be pissed off that the creation of my first sword had to be put on hold for the sake of making broadheads.

  The village was in a right flurry, adults going full throttle in preparing defensive measures while the children were recruited to transport all the bullshit between points. For the smithy that meant a bunch of extra tools and nails were getting melted down so my father could rush through making proper spears. We could've just used the farm tools as weapons but…well they weren’t designed for that. For the nails? That was just irony come round to bite me in the ass.

  Besides, we had the time.

  We were only on the edge of the horde, if the dozen more that showed up that morning was any measurement. Goblin hordes could be fast or slow, it really depended on how many orcs were present. Those decided battles in a matter of hours, but they needed to run between villages where their scattered millions were struggling. That was a fun tidbit from the game I actually remembered, mostly because it was an interesting amount of thought to put into something that didn’t fucking matter. What with a horde never actually happening in the game.

  There were hundreds of villages between the two major cities that would surely respond to the threat, each carrying hundreds if not a thousand able bodies to stall the horde. So we had…who knows! I certainly didn’t!

  I just had to make these goddamn broadheads, which was cutting into my training as well because grinding the edge on that shit wasn’t taxing at all. That whole situation was bullshit. Just a whole load of it raining down in the form of green gremlins.

  I took a breath. Then another. Then a whole series of square breathing.

  That was another fun thing I remembered, great for dealing with moments like these. Breath in, hold. Breath out, hold. A cyclical rhythm that got my body nice and calm. I needed to get my body to calm down. Because I had work to do, plenty and plenty of work to fill my time and fill my mind and stop from the stupid thinking. People were relying on me, I was the only one making broadheads in the whole fucking village.

  Just one family of smiths to service little over a thousand people, it worked out well enough when there wasn’t any urgency, but now there was a lot of that. Tap dancing all over my sanity, reminding me that I was absolutely going to be responsible for how well the defence went depending on how many arrows I crafted.

  Anyone who could even work the grindstone was doing other shit anyway, why not put all this pressure on a child! What could possibly go wrong? Calm, I wasn’t a child. Not in mind, I could handle it.

  Just breathe.

  It’d be fine, I’d be fine. The disaster would surely pass and everything would be just peachy because if I was going to die I’d at least die to the shit I’d been preparing for.

  Yeah, that logic made enough sense to be acceptable.

  I continued grinding away at the arrowhead, controlling my breathing all the while. I tossed it into a box filled with them, waiting for some fool youth to bring them to Tairo. Fucking eedjit. Actually had to work for once in his fucking life and relegated himself to teaching people how to do his job rather than actually doing it.

  I knew that was a perfectly legitimate use of his time, but I didn’t get the same privilege so it kind of struck a chord in my this pissed me off guitar. Was that a thing? I’d make it a thing. I’d invent the damn guitar and bass and mandoline and ukelele—

  Calm. Focus on the air, and how nice it was to have in my lungs.

  Nice, crisp air.

  Then get back to work.