Potential Problems

Thankfully though, it appeared as though I had been wrong, as the two people nearing the boxes just looked inside and then left silently. That was extremely out of character though, as I would have assumed that they would just eat the food without thinking about the consequences as they were still hungry.

Regardless since they seemed to be adjusting to the settlement somewhat, I just left them to their own devices and decided just to begin teaching them how to chop down a tree since most of them seemed to be willing to live in the settlement. Still, when I tried to teach them, they just sort of ignored me. In contrast, the leader seemed more interested in the ax itself, specifically its destructive capabilities.

Seeing that we were getting nowhere, I stopped trying and grabbed all of the axes before hiding them inside the mattress, making sure nobody saw me. For some reason, I felt worried by the look the leader had on his face when he saw them.

Seeing that teaching something useful but boring hadn't worked, I decided to focus more on teaching them how to play soccer. I began contemplating how they were so much more difficult to teach than all the other nomads on my way to find them.

And it was only after a while that I realized that I had gotten fairly lucky with the nomads I had integrated into the settlement. After all, now that I could actually compare the behavior of the other nomads I had encountered to an entire, complete tribe, I realized that the only reason any of the nomads I had found had willingly and followed my direction was that they were all at their weakest when I encountered them.

In the end, surprisingly, they actually really liked soccer, and the leader seemed to be especially fond of it. From there though, since there was nothing else to teach them unless they were actually going to become long-term members of the settlement, I just let them be; it was already 5 pm anyway, so there wasn't really that much of a problem.

There was still a problem though, as although the nomads had been willing to be here, and most of them seemed to actually really like being here (probably because of the free food), they were all being held back from going any further than just accepting what their leader allowed them to because, well, they were still loyal to their leader, which meant that I would have a harder time trying to get any of them to join the settlement.

And while I was certainly ok with all of them leaving if they chose to do so, I had noticed that the leader had begun treating the settlement as though it was his, which normally would not be much of a problem except for the fact that he had about the same number of people under him as we had in the settlement.

So to solve what could potentially be two problems in one, I decided to make an enemy out of the tribe leader by treating the people under him fairly. That way, if a fight truly were to break out, there would be a bigger chance for some of the people mistreated by the hierarchy under their tribal leader would side with us.

Still, since it was already pretty late, the only chance I had to put the plan into action would be to have a very rare dinner today. So after setting everything up, I cooked the food but made sure to give the food to the people that seemed to be the lowest in the hierarchy and the work my way up, making it so that the tribe leader ate last.

This, of course, enrages the tribal leader as he was probably used to eating first since he controlled how the food was divided (and mind you to them, food was the most important thing). Even worse for him, when he tried to get the people who had already received food to give it to him, I stopped them from doing so, basically belittling his 'authority' over his tribe.

This caused the tribe leader to begin looking at me with true hatred in his eyes, basically securing the fact that there would be some type of conflict tonight; I wasn't too worried though, as from what I could see, the people lower on the hierarchy had already come to realize that they would have it better here.

After the dinner was over, I added more wood to the fire and set up a wooden roof on top of it using some pillars to ensure that it wouldn't go out, at least for half an hour before making an area for the nomads to sleep in and got everyone else to clock out for the night.

As for myself, when I got to my house, I took the axes from under the pillows and stuck them onto the back of the 'pillow case' to put it that way, only keeping one in my hand under the blanket. And to make things easier for me, once the attack started, I was also basically sitting down with my back against the wall.

From there, I just waited; since I knew that the nomads had no weapons right now, and I was the person who pissed off their leader, I knew that I would be the main target when they decided to attack.

And although I did somewhat feel like it would be slightly unethical to kill them if they tried to kill me since I had sort of provoked the leader, at the end of the day, the leader of the nomad tribe would have still tried to kill someone because they simply annoyed and threatened his dominance.

Before I could stop to contemplate for too long, I could hear footsteps nearing my house slowly yet loud enough to be easily identifiable. From there, they opened my leaf door quietly, and I could barely make out to shadows enter my room with one holding what seemed to be a sharp stick.