Thankfully, there must have been some sort of automatic translation since I was able to understand what came out of the woman on the other side of the screen’s mouth. Either that, or everybody in the universe spoke American English.

“Kaila,” the woman said, her ears twitching atop her head. “That’s my name.” I couldn’t see all of it, but I could see at least part of her tail wagging behind her.

“Nice to meet you, Kaila,” I said. “So, what about my offer? I want you to join us.”

“Sounds fun! But can’t. Have to give you a quest first. Not allowed to join unless you do it.” Even the way she spoke reminded me of a dog. Simple and fast.

“You can’t just join us right away?”

She shook her head. “Have to give quest. That’s what system told us.”

“Alright. Then what quest do you have for us?”

“Don’t know. Have to think of one ourselves. Then system has to approve it.”

“Alright. Well, let me know when you’ve thought of something.” I was tempted to ask her to hurry up and figure something out, but I didn’t want to appear too desperate. The more desperate I appeared, the more dangerous the quest might be since she could give us a harder objective, I figured. Plus it was never good to appear desperate during negotiations in the first place.

“Have idea! Let me check with system.”

Well, that was fast.

“System approves!”

Really fast.

“Meat! We want meat! We haven’t found any meat, but we love meat! We love the hunt! Find hunting ground for us, and we'll join you!”

“So, you want us to find a place where you can hunt. Once we find that, you’ll join us?”

“Right! So hungry. The food they give us is no good. No beasts to hunt for better food. But playing in ash is fun! Never had this much ash at home! Like snow! But bad for hiding from each other. Can track prints in the ash. No hiding and hunting games.” Kaila sighed as her ears drooped down against her head. “Miss playing hide and hunt. Miss hunting. Agh! Need to hunt! Claws are burning up! Need to rend! Need to eat! If we can’t find beasts… you will have to be our hunt.”

She was kind of endearing at first. Very dog-like. I even wanted to pet her head.

Then she brought up hunting us for what sounded like food.

I wasn’t so sure about that part.

And that was when a smaller, secondary window popped up in front of me. Two, actually. One in front of the other.

So, their species stats made them significantly better than the demons. They only had slightly more health, but they dealt over twice as much damage by default, were more than three times as loyal, and faster by two. The downside was that their defense and resistance were both lower, and their size was less than half that of the demons. So any unit made using volcano hounds would have thirteen less people in it than if it was made with lesser demons. Seven times twenty is one forty. The demons had a size of twenty and did seven damage, so twenty times seven is… one forty. They basically had the same total damage potential in that case.

It looked like the demons would be better in general due to more units and higher defense and resistance while the volcano hounds would make better—well, elite cavalry units, basically. Charge in, deal a ton of damage, move out, and repeat. I wouldn’t want to commit them to a straight up brawl, but they would be a good hammer for hammer and anvil tactics.

But considering that we couldn’t get more demons even if we wanted to, I was probably going to have to use the volcano hounds for brawls anyways.

I figured I should probably find out what those traits were before moving on.

The first two traits looked incredible. That third one, not so much. From my understanding, that meant they basically wouldn’t be eligible to be spearmen or hunters since spearmen used—well, spears, and it sounded like hunters used bows. That meant they could only become the settler unit unless they came with their own unit type. I’d just have to hope that they did and ask Enna about it later. Even if that trait seemed inconvenient, getting a new source of population was more important.

I also figured that the “natural weapons” in their case were their giant, clawed paw-hands. It made sense why they couldn’t use normal weapons with those.

Anyways, I moved onto the next window.

I was glad to have a quest to assimilate them. At the same time, I wasn’t so glad to have a strict time limit on finding and claiming a creature tile to offer them. Especially seeing as how failing said quest would mean them turning hostile and hunting us down, even outside of their home region.

I just had to hope that we would get lucky and find a creature tile right inside of our territory once the hunter unit was finished the next day.

Unfortunately, I doubted we would be that lucky.

Even so, I had to accept it. Well, confirm that I was going to try and complete it. It looked like it was already accepted by default.

“We’ll find you your hunting grounds,” I said.

Kaila’s ears twitched and a smile spread across her face. “Hunt! Find hunting grounds and we’ll hunt for you, too. But if you don’t… don't forget, we’ll hunt you.” She smiled even wider when she said that.

There was something both intimidating and arousing about that.