Somehow I was able to find out almost all the details of what had happened.
Last night, almost twenty-four hours ago already, more than a hundred people, earthlings, came to the village. Some were wounded, half were armed, and there were even machine guns, though most of the weapons were homemade spears and long-handled axes. The head man, a guy no older than twenty-five, asked for a portion of the houses, no more than ten, and help for the first time with medicine and food, and they would work it off. The magician assured me that some of the men in the squad could start guarding the village at any moment.
Stepping back from the topic, I will say that he touched on a sore point. There has been no unity and coherence in the village since the transfer. Jack, who was elected head during my absence, was more of a mediator between the two factions and commanded the working part, those who had not joined anyone and preferred to live by the principle "my house on the edge". Each side had more than a hundred people, and they lived on different sides of the settlement, with the center and the outskirts occupied by the abstinent people, for the most part, and Jack and a small handful of like-minded people.
They tried to organize the security of the settlement, but with strange methods: each "district" was obliged to set up their own guards, and in the end it all came to the fact that the night guards guarded only their own, leaving huge gaps in the perimeter.
Nothing came of the protective moat either. People frightened by the transfer to alien world and by the sight of huge predators, which watched the settlement from afar, took up their work zealously, but once it was clear that they had to work with full dedication, from dawn to dusk, for nothing, and even their own food, and the promised tractor would help only in particularly difficult places, then the accounts and reproaches immediately began. They got tired of working for the team, for the future. Even the older generation, who still remembered and even participated a little in the life of the collective farms (maybe that is why they made the most noise, young people refused to work, seeing that all wanted to burden them), revolted. The ditch that had been started is still yellowing as a hill of clay, as a symbol of human selfishness. But they could have asked me, and I could have allocated a golem to work, which would have replaced five of them.
Okay, I was distracted.
The fire-mage had brought up the subject of security, which was painful for Jack. Yes, and the stranger said it in rebuke, something like that his scouts had time to consider the entire village, getting close to the walls of houses.
Next... next Jack Smith, feeling confident in his power in the form of the Lumberjack, who was standing nearby, decided to put the young pointer in his place. He showed fire, which engulfed his hands to the elbows, and said in the spirit that if I wanted, I would have burned the whole place down, and there was no need to make him angry and bring it to this. Then he turned around and walked away.
And then the head felt a twinge in one place and decided to show that he was not a stranger either. He shouted something to his back like "my golem is about to shove your fire lobes up your ass, try to scare him with fire.
And he shouldn't have said that in front of the Tin Man. My golem is like that bird in the cartoon, only it's not "smart and clever. He had no mental connection with Jack, as he had with me, but he was guided by words. So he understood his superior's speech literally and stepped towards the fire mage.
And the latter, turning to respond to the last lunge of the head of the village, saw the attacking golem. If it had been Chappy or Arachnid in the place of the slow Tin Man, the mage would have died quickly, before he could do anything. He ran as far away as he could and attacked with fireballs the size of tennis balls.
The first hit damaged his hand with the sledgehammer, the second pierced his shield and wasted his energy. Instead of the third, the mage had to cover himself with a wall of flame as the Tin Man dropped his shield and armed himself with a dart from a piece of rebar. This projectile pierced the magical barrier and wounded the mage in the shoulder.