I think it’s safe to say that if some peripheral character is specifically mentioned more than once, it’s going to become important at some point in the series’ future. Just think about it: of all the people mentioned in book 12 as sitting at Regnorex’s council, which one were mentioned by name? Haec, Oracli, Jofis the Winged Horror, Manos the Executioner, Levithus, Safra the Lady of Glory, Hartia. How many have become important characters later on? Exactly.

Or, let’s go deeper into the beginnings. Jaakko, Zack and Helen become recurring characters. Saffron becomes an important character later on. Belzu becomes an important character. Essentially, Melas introduces someone only if they get to matter later on. Also, some things that are mentioned as peripheral at some point have a tendency of becoming central. The end of the world is mentioned in the third book, in the context of the Kobolds, and it later becomes more and more important, and now corruption is one of the cornerstone issues of the series. It’s no longer a matter of fringe belief of Kobold cultists – it’s a matter of life and death.

So, what breadcrumbs did Melas leave for us in the previous books, that foreshadow the future events?

Kobolds are certainly important and things that happened with Xidra look like they are going to matter in the future. Salvos encountering the Elves also foreshadows future encounters. That Cerberus of Hell lvl. 193, the one Salvos set on fire with Sacred Hellfire when it tried to go through the portal into the Mortal Realm, the one that tried to break into the Third Legion, made a mess, forced Hartia to flee and provided cover for Haec and his team, the one Salvos saw later when she was flying into the Demon King’s Domain – it was mentioned too many times for it not to foreshadow a fight in the future. Also, the Great Agarus – it attacked Salvos twice, and twice she had to flee. Salvos thinks it hated her corrupted Title, but what if it hated something else? She’s the Devil’s daughter. The Devil said that “someone” killed the Great Agarus six times in a day and it kept respawning. It sounds too specific, especially since the number of people capable of killing the Great Agarus lvl. 225 six times in a day can be counted at one hand, and that’s after a drunken party at the saw mill. It’s most likely that the Devil himself tried to kill it, but the damn thing just kept respawning due to resurrection skills, and he eventually ran out of Skills and had to retire from the fight. I would assume that the Great Agarus holds a grudge after that.

At the current point, Salvos needs to level very quickly in order to reach her Primordial evolution, because time is running out for the world. She also ran out of small problems. Freeing the Legions was one such problem; done. Everything under lvl. 190 is not a problem for her, unless very exotic Grand Skills are involved. Things above lvl. 190, things that include exotic Grand Skills, they are potentially deadly, and yet it’s exactly those she will have to fight in order to level. The Cerberus is an obvious loose end, and it’s also nearby. Let’s say she gets a reasonably easy win there, bringing her to to high 180s in her Subspecies and high 170s in her Class. That’s what we’d call a good start, but then she still needs 10-12 levels in her Subspecies and 20 in her Class, and, unfortunately, there’s only one type of a fight I can think of that can give her that many levels: Great Agarus. Let’s say she’s not looking for a fight with it, but neither did she the first two times. Let’s say it’s looking for her, or bumps into her while she’s doing her thing. She has one thing the Devil didn’t have – the Immortalslayer Title, which gives her a bonus of +10% probability of striking a deadly blow against an Immortal. We also know that the Great Agarus is weak against the Corruption. This makes it an easier fight than the one against Matriarch Centinel, who wasn’t weak to anything in particular, and was 13 levels higher. That fight is just too convenient at this spot for it not to happen. Also, Salvos just got her Immortality Skill, which probably means she’s going to die and be resurrected at some point soon. The problem is, this is still an easier fight than moving against Regnorex, Oracli, Safra and Focalor at the same time. Much easier. But, as I said, she ran out of easy problems. Everything from now on is going to be really deadly, and she will be fighting the world’s unsolved problems, and she’s out of time. The ritual has begun, she needs 17 levels in her Subspecies and 29 in her Class like yesterday, she needs to get her head sorted out, and she has very little time to do it. Days, at most. It’s been two weeks since she fought Hartia, and she was lvl. 167/149. She gained 16/22 levels since then, plus a Class advancement, a Title change, a stackable Title gain, and new Skills learned. Most of the levelling, however, happened in Jofis and Chordus fights, and that was basically one day. So, it’s not impossible for her to do it in a matter of days, but those would have to be particularly bad fights. And then, she would have the ritual to deal with, as well as Regnorex and his core team, and after that I suspect it’s Trico and the Corruption. You see why I expect her to die at least once in those fights? It’s a whole lot of stuff concentrated in very little time, and I suspect that ritual is doing cumulative damage to the world. I don’t know how long it is intended to last, but Haec got one thing right: it needs to be stopped immediately. It’s just that they don’t have the means to do it yet, and Salvos will have to pull multiple rabbits out of her hat in a very short period of time. I expect she will still be short when she has to deal with the ritual, but she will have to do it regardless.

So, I expect her to level a lot, but not enough to evolve. Then she tries to deal with the ritual, gets stuck in some limbo between life and death, unable to escape, unable to finish what she started. Then Sally starts to sync, she gets her uncorrupted soul template back, as well as Sally’s memories and experience. Then Edithe/Archangel kills the Matriarch Centinel, and a flood of experience comes to Salvos, for her contribution to that fight. She gets enough experience to evolve, and possibly even to advance her Class. She evolves into the next God evolution as well as Primordial, and her Class is something like “Master of Corruption”, or even “Master of Reality”. She deals with the ritual first, then with everything else, I guess, but this is the point where I’m leaving it to Melas because I would have to make things up.

Somewhere in the fight against the Great Agarus, I expect her to exceed her limitations and develop a super-deadly Nuke Grand skill, the “I Am…”, which is what she kills it with.

If Salvos were human, we could safely diagnose her as being on the autistic spectrum, with some psychopathic tendencies, but I think that would be a mistake. You see, she looks like she’s getting social cues extremely poorly, in the opinion of her human companions, but that is so only when they are dealing with other humans, where they have the advantage of common biology and social implications that are mutually understood. When the ground is equal, for instance when they have to understand animals, monsters, a Fairy or a Kobold, Salvos actually understands them much better than her human companions. She instantly forms a rapport with Lily, where Daniel fumbles. She instantly picks up Xidra’s formal way of communication and social norms, while, again, Daniel fumbles. So, when they are both facing an unknown species with unknown implications and social norms, Salvos picks it up much easier and faster. Only when the humans have the advantage of dealing with other humans, where they already know everything, does Salvos look slow to pick up cues and, comparatively, seems autistic. But when she needs to find common ground with a Centinel, a Spirit and a monster, it’s very easy for her. What am I saying? Humans are good with other humans, and with Salvos when she emulates a human perfectly. Salvos, on the other hand, is good with everybody. She’s good with Demons, Humans, Fairies, Elves, animals, some monsters, Orcs, Kobolds and Spirits. She even managed to communicate and come to terms with a sentient giant Golem. If she can’t communicate with something, it’s likely that nothing can.

So, why is it then that she has so much trouble with empathy, at least initially?

I think one of the problems is that she’s self-absorbed. The other problem is that she’s honest; where others would project their emotions outwards, and think they are feeling empathy, she doesn’t. Also, she is confused by the fact that people use different words for different emotional states, and she doesn’t know what they actually mean by it, since they all seem to mean different things; also, they have different biology, and when they make all kinds of implicit assumptions based on sex, for instance, she has absolutely no point of reference. To Humans, she starts as a completely, fundamentally alien being. They have some things in common, for instance the basic ethics where you don’t initiate aggression but will defend yourself if attacked, or that you will try to use words first and only if that doesn’t work you will escalate. Also, they share the basic social instinct, where they both wish to form social bonds with others, but the difference is that Salvos finds it much easier to transcend species, while Humans have a problem with anything that isn’t human.

However, as Salvos grows in experience, she understands emotions of others much better, and as she grows intellectually, she increasingly develops abstract thought; for instance, in the beginning she divides beings into companions and others she doesn’t care for. Then she develops another category: friends. She will socialize with them, help them and so on, but they don’t know that she’s a Demon and she doesn’t know how they would react. Then she develops a further category: those who might become friends or companions, and whom she just didn’t get to know yet. One would expect that to be obvious, but Salvos had to have the concept explained to her by an Elven girl.

Also, her social language is different. She communicates respect with intimacy, while Humans seem to communicate respect with Titles and formality. If Salvos is casual and intimate with someone, it means she cares for the person. The more formal and distant she is, the more obvious it is that she doesn’t care. That can confuse Humans, but they soon pick up her cues as they become familiar with her. She also has no concept of fake modesty, that seems to be one of the common layers of social interactions with Humans; to them, stating one’s achievements is seen as crass. To her, it’s normal. Also, she initially has no concept of humour and takes things literally when they are meant figuratively. She gets much better at it with time.

She can seem dumb initially, but that’s only because she’s very young, ignorant and unfamiliar with the environment. Her intelligence is pretty much extreme, if we measure it by how quickly she attains extraordinary level of achievement. Considering how young she is, and considering her level of accomplishment in various spheres, she meets the definition of a super-genius, with speed of comprehension that is matched only by the greatest minds in the world, like Clayton and Helena. Only those mental giants are able to pick new ideas up with a speed that approximates hers, and that says something. She goes from not understanding her classes at all, to getting excellent grades, within a semester; from not knowing any alchemy, to making an extremely tricky High Grade potion that not even Alchemist Gabriel ever attempted. Her Space Magic advances from never hearing about space magic to being able to create her own pocket space and travel between planes within six to eight years, when Edithe initially estimated the difficulty of the problem as being expected to take a hundred years to learn. That doesn’t make her merely accomplished and competent, it makes her one of the brightest minds in the world. At approximately seven years old, her level of power, skill and knowledge is such, that she commands respect and attention from Belzu and Helena Warshade simultaneously. She’s not seen as a child, she’s seen as a peer, and her commands are obeyed. And yet, she occasionally behaves like a child, and that’s the paradox. She’s a super-genius child that looks like an adult woman who is seen as immature and childish. Essentially, she’s weird, but good weird. People see her as quirky, but when there’s a battle, she kicks ass and takes names. When she takes you into battle, she will do absolutely everything so that you come out alive. That, by the way, is one of the reason why she’s so respected in the Human society: she takes risks, but her companions survive and come home stronger. She doesn’t get people killed. This means that her reckless behaviour isn’t so reckless, and her protectiveness is well known. In only two cases did her battle partners die on her watch: the battle of Westshield where she lost Mori Gladius and all her clones, where she and Mori were winning until Levithus suddenly arrived to kill Mori and wound Belzu with a sudden attack, and kill her last remaining clone; also, the last battle against Chordus, where she lost Naro, a high levelled Primeval Demon, commander of the Tenth Legion, who defected from Regnorex and joined her, and who sacrificed himself to give her the opportunity to kill Chordus. In both cases, she was not happy with that, but also it needs to be said that in both cases the casualties were not due to her recklessness or callousness, but due to the difficult nature of both battles, where one was a heavy defeat, and the other a close victory. Considering the number of battles she fought, those statistics are remarkable, and although you can say that she was often lucky, the truth is that it can also be said that she lost and had casualties only when she had the worst luck imaginable, like losing Mori at the cusp of victory, because a completely unexpected enemy teleported into the field of battle and wiped them out instantly, or having a lvl. 193 Chordus using a super weird suicidal Grand Skill that transformed her into a progressive series of different foes until lvl. 205, which could also have ended badly. Also, Westshield could have easily ended even more badly, since Belzu found a way to curse her clones in a way that affected her true body, and her companions had to watch her bleeding and losing balance in a distant hall. Also, another factor of bad luck at Westshield was that both her Grand Skills were on cooldown, and she was forced to battle Belzu before she was ready for him. So, we established with certainty that she doesn’t calculate with losses in her battles. Her plan is always to get everybody out alive, and she does that often at great cost to herself, such as in the battle against the Archarachne, where she, Orgaf and Helena were stuck together within the Primeval Demon’s deadly Grand Skill, and Salvos eventually threw herself into the worst of danger to draw attention away from them, and she used an attack that overexerted her to the point that injured her soul so much that Daniel and Edithe had to carry her to a healing mage while she cried in agony, and she was left with the wounded soldiers in Lunaris when Ira attacked. That’s how she created the wake of respect behind herself: she was known as someone who would throw herself into the thick of things to protect others, and she saved lives. Sure, she ate bugs and did weird things, but when she arrived at the field of battle, people felt hope and safety. You were about to kiss your ass goodbye, and then she came, turned the battle and you lived. There are very few people who caused such reactions with their appearance alone. That’s not a reputation you can build by being reckless and lucky.

Also, her empathy developed exponentially after the mind magic contact with Lux Golmi in the Rainforest of Monsters, and after the Devil annoyed her to the point of realising how she comes off to others, and especially after getting the Truth Divination skill, which makes everybody affected know the feelings, thoughts and truth of each other. That started innocuously, but it turned out to be one of her most devastating Skills, in a sense that it allows her to turn potential enemies into friends, understand the truth of a situation, and heal people’s souls. This also allowed her to learn what people actually mean when they say something; for instance, what “love” actually means to them, because it is one thing to hear the word, and quite another to feel the actual emotion.

That Skill is extremely intimate, more intimate than sex. It removes all borders between two souls, and the only thing comparable is the Link between the Founders of the Dominion, in the Deep Space Nine series. Salvos first uses it accidentally with a wounded Wyvern. Then she uses it to show people she’s telling the truth, and to see what they mean by certain emotion-words. Then she uses it to understand Belphegor, and to make her father understand how she feels and to convey a message from Belphegor. She uses it to turn Hartia from a sworn enemy to an ally, and to see whether Manos is serious. It’s a capital, strategic capability that turns her into a completely different order of being. Also, there’s something particularly powerful with the way she uses the Skill, because of the nature and the state of her soul. She’s pure, sincere and deeply powerful in some unexplained way, and when people come into direct contact with her, in ways more intimate than sex, every thought of conflict with her vanishes. Hartia, for instance, completely lost all his belligerence when he truly felt her; he instantly changed from trying to kill her to crying.

This makes Salvos a paradox – she’s someone who self-declares as an ultimately selfish person who cares only about herself and her companions, and one of her most powerful Skills is that of absolute soul-connection and total empathy. She looks like someone who’s slow to pick up social cues, and yet manages to communicate with almost all species and understand their “language”.

What’s likely to come next is that she will try to talk to the Beast, by opening Truth Divination with it, and that might be the most extreme application of the Skill yet. If she indeed gets the Beast on her side, this change the strategic layout of the entire situation to the point where she wins the fight agains Regnorex automatically. However, I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. The fact that the author gave her the Immortality Skill means she will likely die and be resurrected soon. What happens to her corruption at that point is unknown – it might be removed completely as it was the case with Jofis, or it might get worse, when the inertia of her outward form is lost and she is reconstructed from the damaged soul template. Also, when she activates the “My Flame…” Grand Skill, that usually regenerates missing limbs and heals all injuries, what will happen with her corrupted arm? In essence, she’s so profoundly in trouble along so many independent vectors, it will take multiple miracles to get her out of that pickle.

There’s a huge story arc of her taking pride in being a Demon, as if that were something she herself caused, and not an accident. She was annoyed to be called human and accepted as such, and wanted to be accepted as a Demon, while her actual choices were such that they made her very different from other Demons. She was considered a great Human, and the System found that she qualified to be a Lesser God at lvl. 150, while the Demons thought she isn’t really a proper Demon. I think she needs to figure that one out: that she doesn’t actually care about being a proper Demon, and would rather be the fullest and best version of herself, whatever that ends up being.

When we saw the council of Regnorex in Haec’s memories, the council members mentioned were Haec, Oracli, Levithus, Safra the Lady of Glory, Manos the Executioner, Jofis the Winged Horror, Hartia, Focalor, and nameless others. Of those, Salvos killed Levithus and Jofis, Haec, Manos and Hartia defected, and Regnorex is currently left with Safra who seems to be his girlfriend, Oracli who is his oldest and most loyal advisor, and Focalor who is enslaved by his own backfiring curse. By all standards, this is a disaster. He lost most of his support base, and all fifty legions. True, what remains are almost 800 Primeval Demons and thousands of Archdemons, but compared to the military importance of himself, Focalor and those two loyal ones, the opposition is still weak. His main weakness is his track record of getting everybody killed, including his most trusted people. He’s callous and cruel, and he’s also a liar. He promises safety and delivers enslavement, and he promises salvation and delivers death. Most who are with him are there out of fear, because he’s powerful. Some actually care for him personally, while some believe in his ideas. Also, within his Domain his power is supposed to be unrivalled, and he likely gets some percentage bonus from being surrounded by his minions. Fighting him there would be a bad idea. Let’s see how that plays out.

Among the Demons, Salvos has a really narrow support base. True, there’s some five million Demons she liberated, but they know almost nothing about her; they merely saw her from a distance. They have no personal loyalty to her. Haec does, but Haec is a weird character who currently seems to be in love with his role as a leader and he’s been annoying Salvos and aggravating her situation. Taburas is all about her relationship with Haec, and her jealousy of Salvos just started to abate. Aemula is a friend, and I think Bertrugil might be surprising in a sense that I expect him to appreciate Salvos the most. He looks like a snarky complainer, but he’s been the most careful observer and deepest thinker of the bunch, he’s the first to notice things and understand their implications, and to him, Salvos is safety and peace. Whenever he was forced to trust her, she delivered. The two of them are friendly and cordial, and he really appreciates her, not only for what she is, but also for just letting him be.

Hartia is weird. He’s scared of the Corruption, he’s still broken, and his faux-Demon persona is jarring. He also suffers from very poor self-awareness and awareness of others and their emotional states. He’s been a reliable ally, though. He has potential to become her companion at one point, but we’re not there yet.

The fact that Salvos left without a warning and that the “rebel army” is disrupted and refuses to march on Regnorex is the best thing that could have happened to them. It would have been suicidal lunacy to attack Regnorex that way. They are too weak, and their greatest value is in taking away Regnorex’s support base, and not being the cannon fodder he can use. They are also useful for giving Haec a great pool of strength to tap into with his Skill, making him strong enough to actually be in a fight against Regnorex and not be instantly evaporated. However, the biggest problem that arises from their existence is that Haec imagines himself a great commander of millions who’s going to lead a victorious valorous charge against the tyrant. That would just get everybody killed, and everybody except Haec seems to be aware of that fact. Salvos, by leaving, forced a pause in those foolish plans, and hopefully that “army” is disrupted and disperses into relative safety, because they are a liability as they are now. They are useless as an army, and exist as merely a protected entity that burdens the strong fighters tactically. Even if there happens to be a next Demon Kingdom, joining it will have to be a matter of free will, on an individual basis. As of now, the best they could do is disperse in random directions and wait it out.

What Salvos needs in a fight are her companions – people she can trust implicitly, who can save her if she gets in trouble, and heal her if she gets injured. Those Demons she has around her, with the exception of Haec, Aemula, Bertrugil, and possibly Hartia and Taburas, are simply not the people one wants to depend on when things get rough. They are more likely to kill her when she’s injured, hoping to level, than risk their lives helping her recover. What she needs there are Daniel, Edithe and Willy. She needs people who are emotionally completely with her without reservations, not lukewarm fair-weather allies and turncoats. Let’s see what happens there.

There’s an important part of the “Salvos” story that is easy to overlook, simply because it isn’t there.

You see, it’s easy to see Salvos as superior to other characters in the story because she doesn’t struggle anywhere near as much as they do. However, it’s a good question if she would have done anywhere near as well if she had their problems.

For instance, Daniel experienced catastrophic emotional loss on Earth when his girlfriend died. His entire life collapsed, and then he got whisked away into another world, where he was deceived and manipulated by his summoners, adding another layer of emotional trauma.

Edithe got her entire team killed, including her lover Paul. It was literally her mistake – she got cocky, she led them into a fight with Lucerna, and they all died, mostly saving her. That was in addition to her childhood as a child of a nameless prostitute who got sick and died and she ended up being raised by a temple priest.

Willy was used as a temple prop for centuries, and when he actually started living for real, his Cyclops friend got a brilliant idea of going into the Bloodied Gulf, where she got killed protecting him from the Centinels, and he got stuck there, depressed.

Rachel was an unwanted child of divorced parents in a violent marriage and her father sold her to the cultists to be used as human sacrifice.

The Devil was an absolutely brilliant person, at least Salvos’ equal, who created the first Demon Kingdom, which remains the best system of government Demons ever had. He was betrayed by his mentor of 1000 years, and the result was the catastrophic collapse of the structure of the world, and the fall of his kingdom, which completely broke his heart.

Hartia was a nice Fairy who specialised in space magic and became Fairy Queen’s architect. He had a girlfriend Ivory, who was everything to him since they were children. He made a mistake with construction of Realityspace, it broke into corruption, and the entire structure of a new world collapsed, killing tens of thousands of Fairies, including his girlfriend and a mentor he greatly admired, Lotus. After that, the Fairy Queen blamed him and attempted to execute him by throwing him into the void, which he survived being a skilled space mage, but his heart broke and he never recovered.

It’s easy for Salvos to look good in comparison. She never lost a companion. She never experienced true betrayal. She didn’t make a terrible mistake that caused deaths of important people in her life. The worst things that happened to her were separation from Haec, which was honestly the best thing that could have happened to her, and the fact that she was surrounded by Humans who hate Demons and she felt unaccepted. Imagine a situation where she led her companions into Plaguelands, and they both died to the Lich, and she had to escape, defeated and in disgrace. Any of the close calls could have ended like that. She could have gotten people killed with her cockiness and lack of proper planning. That she didn’t is more due to luck than anything else, but she always takes the credit for it. Rachel imitated this attitude, and she got Sally killed. Salvos’ plans don’t always end well. She got two Legions killed, around 200000 Demons, when she freed them from their commanders, and they were caught in transit by Jofis; her clones were not powerful enough to protect them, and Jofis killed them all instantly. To her, it wasn’t very important because she didn’t know them and they were merely peripheral characters. However, her plans could as easily have ended badly for people who actually matter to her. I think she lacks the maturity necessary to understand the gravity of consequences.

The purport, I guess, is that it’s easy to look awesome when your burden is light. She looks at her troubled friends and it’s easy for her to see ways where they should get their shit together. However, would she even be able to survive being in their place? For instance, that she got Edithe and Daniel killed the way Edithe got her team killed? That she got Haec killed by straying into Lucerna’s territory, instead of merely getting him captured? Would she be able to shrug that off? I don’t think so, and I think she can thank good fortune for that, because I don’t think she would be able to make so much progress in such a short time. That’s why I consider Belphegor a much more virtuous person than Salvos. He experienced terrible personal loss. His kingdom fell, his world broke, his partner went insane, and it was partially his fault, because he felt something was off and he didn’t stop it. However, he spent 50000 years trying to contain the damage in hope that he will be able to buy enough time for things to be set right at some point in the future, and even without hope, in total despair, he still works, incessantly. Salvos almost fell apart feeling some of his pain in Truth Divination. He continued where everybody else would have either given up or died.

Everybody compares Daniel to the likes of Alexander and Melissa, but never in their formative years, only at their peak. He always falls short in those utterly unfair comparisons, but he matched Salvos in her growth. In some five years, he went from level 16 to 181, and is currently the second highest levelled Human, after the Watcher who’s been around for a century or so. For someone who keeps trying to find reasons to keep going, one day at a time, he’s doing incredibly well. Edithe, too, after having emotionally recovered from her first disaster, then having lost the ability to summon and ending up stranded in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, having to re-invent herself by fighting up-hill battles as the weakest of the three companions, always feeling like the weak link, she became a legendary person in her company, one of the most famous people in the world, and now she’s integrated with the Archangel which initially had a huge probability of ending terribly for her, and now she might actually and up being one of the highest levelled people in the world. It is true that this is largely to Salvos’ credit, since she pulled them out of the gutter and helped them realise their potential with her combination of optimism and risk-taking, but considering how emotionally wounded they were, and how Salvos wasn’t, the fact that they managed to keep up is fascinating. Basically, it’s like comparing a healthy unburdened person with someone wounded and carrying a sack of cement, and the burdened wounded person almost keeps up. That makes them incredibly admirable. Having in mind that Daniel is lost in a foreign world, after his girlfriend died, his life broke apart, and he was friend-zoned by Salvos who is his love interest, and he still managed to reach lvl. 181 by merely gnashing his teeth and living in memories, that makes him actually more admirable, not less. Also, he is being compared to a legendary God King who lived for at least a thousand years, and he’s approaching his level in the first ten years or so of being there.

Apparently, it’s all relative.