This was a perfectly ordinary day.
The old Trolls watching over the livestock nearby, or tending the Fruit Trees, reminisced about the tribe's hardships of old, smiles rising from the bottom of their hearts;
In the newly built school near the central council hall, young Trolls painfully yet happily learned all manner of knowledge, occasionally gazing enviously at the bustle outside the classroom;
In the childcare district, mothers and mothers-to-be either irritably nursed their young Trolls or impatiently complained that they wanted to go hunting, but those brain-sick Witch Doctors simply would not let them.
In short, while it could not be called one hundred percent peaceful, everything in the tribe was proceeding in orderly fashion.
Until a Troll covered in blood appeared miserably at the tribe's entrance, everything had still been like this.
That figure seemed to have opened some sort of cursed box. From almost the same direction, many more equally bedraggled tribesmen fled back one after another close behind him.
The Witch Doctors received the news almost immediately and gave it their gravest concern.
Before long, they had extracted the exact situation: encounter, slaughter, escape, hostile tribe.
The Trolls who had fled back had not come from just a few hunting parties, but from at least a dozen different hunting parties scattered across a vast stretch of land to the east.
The Witch Doctors understood what this meant. It meant that in merely one day—or perhaps several—the tribe had lost close to a hundred workers;
At the same time, it meant that the enemy was absolutely not making some minor nuisance of themselves. This was a large-scale assault, perhaps even one launched with their entire nest emptied.
"Where did the enemy come from?"
"Which tribe would pay such a price!"
"What do we do? What should we