More than eighty thousand refugees had already been settled in villages, while another fifty thousand had yet to be organized into villages. This was mainly because the administrators had introduced a peculiar rule midway through the process.
Every refugee newly arriving in The Hinterlands had to first work at a heavy-labor site, building roads, quarrying stone, or digging artificial rivers. Only after three months could they possibly be assigned to a village.
It was not that there was too little land. There was more than enough! Their inability to cultivate it all was only a minor reason. The main reason was a refugee riot that had broken out on Harbor Plain in The Hinterlands between late October and early November of the previous year. More than seven thousand refugees had participated.
It had begun with some newly arrived refugees who saw that those who had come earlier had received more than they had and felt somewhat dissatisfied. Then someone began stirring up trouble. Their resentment steadily grew, disputes over supplies gradually broke out, and in the end, it escalated into a riot.
The human soldiers under Fourteen and the other administrators could not suppress it, so they had no choice but to request the Troll riot-control troops. By then, Zuga and his six hundred Shadowpine Trolls had undergone half a year of military training. They already looked like soldiers and had been issued equipment, but Broken Tooth and the others were still training them, leaving every one of them brimming with energy and nowhere to unleash it.
The request came at just the right moment. Faced with a riot of this scale, all the administrators unanimously resolved to suppress it with the harshest measures possible. Thus, the Evil Spikes Battalion in Quel'Danil City and the more than three hundred members