"Finally... time to rest my eyes a bit—"

Aiden was just about to enter his unit after Karina when Marcus sent him a message via the pseudo-system. The messaging feature was in the beta phase, so only a few people had access to it now.

Marcus was one of them because he was the one in charge of picking up death drops. The messaging made it convenient for Aiden to tell them instead of assigning long quests each time.

Yes, he was unwilling to spare even three seconds to fill out the most basic quest information.

[Sir, we... have a surprise for you.]

"Surprise for me?" Aiden mumbled, his annoyance disappearing for a moment. "Hm, I can punish him later if I didn’t like the surprise."

Saying so, Aiden quickly typed a response, telling him to meet in the meeting room with his so-called surprise. Marcus was there within minutes, carrying a box in his hands.

"Another death drop?" Aiden asked, looking at the box. "But I didn’t get any notification?"

"No, sir. It’s not one of those boxes," Marcus said, smiling ear to ear. "It’s just something Glenn’s expedition team found while looking for monsters to kill. They were in one of the abandoned goblin camps."

"They?"

Marcus didn’t bother telling him and just placed the box in front of Aiden. Still looking at Marcus, Aiden slowly opened it, and his eyes widened in surprise... genuine surprise.

"...oh my gosh," Aiden smiled and reached out to pick one of the five puppies inside. "Where did you even find these!?"

It was a litter of puppies. One of them was brown with blue eyes, another was gray with a pink nose, and the third was pure white with one ear that refused to stay up.

The fourth was black with a patch of tan fur shaped like a thumbprint above each eye, and the last one was a muddy mix of brown and gray and was the only one with open eyes. Aiden was holding the last one, hugging it close.

After all, it looked just like his beloved Cerbie did when it was a child, minus the two missing heads.

Marcus knew Aiden would like them. After all, who didn’t like little puppies?

However, he didn’t expect him to be so touched. If Marcus hadn’t seen it, he would have refused to even think that Aiden had such a soft side for anyone other than those he slept with.

"Glenn found a rotting direwolf corpse at the goblin camp," Marcus said, while Aiden hugged the little beasts one after the other. "He thinks the mother must have been captured by them after giving birth, since she must have spent too much energy pumping them out."

Aiden nodded silently. It didn’t take a genius to know what would have happened there. The goblins didn’t attack the wolf to eat her, they just wanted the puppies to raise them as riders.

After all, taming a grown adult was next to impossible, hence, one must tame them when they are young.

The mother, being a mother, fought them off to protect the babies, but failed. The goblins, being the lazy assholes they were, made their camp right there.

"It is a great find," Aiden said, inspecting another puppy. "These little beasts are known to be fiercely loyal to their masters. Ha! In no time, we’d have a new rank of fighters. If I were you, I’d start worrying about getting replaced with actual wolves, haha!"

Aiden meant it as a joke, but Marcus’s face actually fell. The fool had gotten so used to being ordered around by Aiden that he couldn’t tolerate the thought of being replaced, even as a joke.

"Did you forget your last lesson so soon?" Aiden glared at him from the corner of his eye.

"N-Not at all, sir! I would never do anything to betray your trust!"

"Good. Then you can leave now," he said, still glaring at him. "And tell Glenn to keep an eye out for more of these. Also, I’ll send the reward for his find soon."

Marcus popped a salute and rushed out. If anything scared him more than being abandoned, it was angering Aiden.

Aiden watched him leave before breaking into smiles again. The little fur-babies always had such an effect on him.

[As usual, they have won you over without expressing their loyalty, Host.]

"They are the few who don’t need to do that," Aiden said and kept smiling.

However, he would need more such wolves. After all, the direwolves never mated with their siblings or close relatives. They would rather go extinct than engage in incest.

Aiden admired that fact about them, as they were one of the few animals that did that in the Otherworld. Demons used to engage in such acts, but it was made illegal under Aiden’s rule.

However, he didn’t do it for the reasons one would think. If the demons didn’t engage in certain acts, they would build frustration.

The frustration that Aiden redirected to be used to attack vampires and humans who dedicated themselves to the system gods.

"Hm... I should think of their names."

[Host... I would suggest you don’t.]

"And why is that?"

The system couldn’t say it out loud, but Aiden’s name sense wasn’t the brightest. He literally named a Cerberus to Cerbie, and that was the most thought he had put into naming someone.

That was the reason none of his wives let him name their children in the Otherworld. Though it wasn’t like he cared about them. He had too many wives to remember them all, much less the countless children he had.

If not for the system’s aid, he would have caused a civil war amongst his wives, just because he didn’t remember them for the most part.

Upon remembering how Aiden treated them, the system couldn’t hold back anymore and gave it to him straight.

[...naming your children Onahole Product 1 and so on doesn’t exactly give confidence to your abilities, Host.]

Aiden’s mouth twitched at being reminded of that. He had already made up for that mistake and gave ’Onahole Product 1’ a sister called Juliana.

"Forget about naming them for now," Aiden murmured. "They have arrived at the most opportune time."