Salvos is defined as a Demon of Pride, pride being her sin, because Demons of Nexeus have their sin unlocked at lvl. 70. Other sins are obviously greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth and lust. Those don’t actually work the way you would expect; for instance, rather than being slaves to their sins, they seem to use them to their advantage. A Demon of Sloth would find strength in solid things and rest, and be empowered by having others do most of the work. A Demon of Wrath reflects other people’s anger back at them, and manages to be the calm centre of a storm that provokes others to wrath in order to enslave and destroy them. So, it isn’t as trivial as one would think; also, someone like Belphegor seems to be a Primordial Demon of Sloth, which is visible from the fact that he creates Gargoyles and Golems made of rock to assist him, finding a source of strength in firm, solid things. Also, he seems to move extremely slowly, and yet somehow fast at the same time. But rather than being lazy, as one would expect, he’s merely incredibly steady, reliable and persistent, the way a mountain is. He keeps doing his terrible duty in a dark pit of doom, living in his memories and pain, but never letting go or giving up. I find him the most admirable and virtuous person in all of “Salvos” world. So, the “sins” of Demons are not what you would expect. Rather, “sloth” might be merely a different word for “diligence” and “persistence”, when it exists in the uppermost part of its spectrum. Likewise, Salvos’ “pride” exists in a spectrum – from hubris, arrogance and cockiness at the lower end, to pride of achievement that motivates great deeds, and, ultimately, pure love that is pride of seeing the loved ones thrive and succeed. The realistic part of it is that the entirety of this spectrum seems to exist at some point or another, and she never seems to completely lose the lower end; she is always prone to hubris, cockiness and arrogance, at least to some degree, but as she evolves as a person, the higher end of the spectrum seems to be present to a greater extent.

Also, what makes her character admirable is the fact that her pride is tempered by strategic wisdom, especially when she’s calm and thinks about what to do next and how to approach it. When she’s in a fight, she’s more likely to fall victim to the more shallow and stupid aspects of pridefulness, creating a tunnel vision that often gets her stuck in situations where she started fighting an enemy she can’t beat, uses up most of her resources and ends up in a “now what?” scenario.

However, in the last few books, it is very hard to say that pride is her primary motivator. Let’s see what she does – she helps Haec in his rebellion against Regnorex, because she loves him and feels protective. She also feels duty and responsibility because she was forced to leave him alone to fend for himself in that terrible place when she fell into a portal, and now she tries to make it up to him. Sure, she’s proud of being strong and being able to do it, but that feels very much secondary; the primary motives are love, responsibility and duty. She also wants to become strong, the strongest in the Nexeus, partly because of her pride, but partly in response to her father’s goading. There is, however, the important aspect of it that is strategic – she knows the world is doomed and everything she loves will be taken away from her if she’s too weak to do something about it, and this also drives her actions to a great extent. Currently, she feels that everybody in the Mortal Realm is in mortal danger from Regnorex, and she wants to deal with him in order to save and protect her friends and companions – again, the main motive is protective love and, to a point, possessiveness over the things she loves. You can say that her approach is egotistical, but you can’t say it’s wrong or sinful.

Unlike Haec, who is an idiot, and who would charge into a fight he can’t possibly win, Salvos is smart enough to understand that she has no strategy, no tactics and no plan that makes any kind of sense. Her strategic sense is telling her that she had tied herself to a train that’s heading to a straight cliff at full speed. Tactically, she’s exhausted, injured and emotionally traumatised by two very close wins that could have very easily ended differently, and she became aware that her allies are something completely different than what she came to expect in the Mortal Realm, and now she’s even questioning whether she forgot to be a Demon and what it even means.

The obvious answer she will likely come up with is that she was born a Demon by accident, but everything else she accomplished was by choice. If that choice makes her more God than Demon, then so be it. She definitely doesn’t feel much like the modern Demons of Regnorex, but she would fit right in with the First Demon Kingdom of her father. So, it’s not necessarily that she doesn’t know how to be a Demon properly; rather, it’s that the other Demons fail to realise more than a fraction of their own potential. This is what Belzu realized when he was dying: he thought that to be a Demon is to be cruel, pragmatic, focused only on survival, but then he remembered his childhood, where the others were social, kind, and loving. They were all Demons, not Mortals he would later associate such qualities with. The fact that the environment creates a pressure of the kind that makes the kind and good ones less likely to survive doesn’t make them any less of a Demon; it just means that in a different environment, they could be a completely different people.

Manos told her that she forgot how to be a Demon properly because she lived with the Mortals. He believes it, and she thinks there’s something to it, as well. However, what she needs to realise is that this very Manos is looking for a salvation from the terrible nightmare the Netherworld has been beating him into, and that the way out looks like Salvos. She’s the example of what a Demon can become if she’s surrounded by a different environment. She developed more sophisticated emotions, behavioural patterns and worldview. She’s not less of a Demon, but she’s a better, more rounded person, while the Demons of Netherworld look stunted and collimated into an unidirectional ray of violence and survival.

Also, since she unlocked her sin, she made being a Demon of Pride into a thing to be proud of, because it’s her, and since it’s her it must be great, because she’s Salvos and she’s great. Is it, however? At her lvl. 150 evolution, she already had to face the same problem, and she solved it by stating that she’s proud of being a Demon, but she’s also proud of having become more.

So, considering how little she has been motivated by pride, and how much it evolved into protective love, I wonder if she’ll get an evolution that reflects that, at 200. We know that the Devil “no longer bears the same sin”, since the fall. Something happened to him and he’s no longer a Primordial Demon of Pride – rather, it turned into despondency or depression, which might turn out to be a possibility; or is it regret and guilt? We know that she already has features that resemble those of Spirits – the angelic wings, for instance; purely Demonic features could no longer hold her evolutionary choices. Haec got an evolution that gave him a second sin, so he’s now a Primeval Demon of Lust and Wrath. It stands to reason that Salvos could be a Primordial Demon of Love and Pride, or something like that; or, that she would have an evolution of both her Species – a Demon, and a God. If her Demon-self is prideful, her God-self is protective, caring and loving. Those things often blend together into something indistinguishable, but still, the fact remains that she has a second subspecies of Lesser God, and this subspecies is likely to evolve at 200. Also, she’s nearing the evolution of her Class at 200, and this one is possibly even more interesting, since it’s currently dominated by Corruption, but one of the options she couldn’t accept without dying used to belong to the Fairy Queen – “The Forerunner of Space and Time”. Even that fact alone makes Salvos extremely impressive, because it means she’s following in the footsteps of the most significant people in the history of the world. If she manages to overcome the Corruption, what would her Class become? Obviously, it will involve absolute mastery of Space Magic, space travel, space creation and Worldwalking. Her current abilities encompass Space Magic at the level of a Fairy Queen’s Architect, Corruption manipulation and control at a level below that of the Matriarch Centinel, but above anyone else we know of, Divine Nebular Creation, Soul Magic, and so on. Her soul-vector is a specific combination of Pride and Love, where both were always present, but at this point in her character development I would say that Pride is definitely a secondary feature. In fact, her behavioural pattern indicates emotional regression due to traumatic stress, anxiety and deprivation of the sophisticated emotional spectrum she got accustomed to with her Mortal companions, and Pride is hardly a factor at all. The place Melas left her at is one where she needs to know herself, understand what she is, what she wants, and then proceed from a place of clarity. Then, Manos needs to hear an answer to his claim; no, she didn’t forget what it means to be a Demon. She’s merely something Demons can become, if they choose to, and “salvation” is not a place, the way Regnorex seems to think. It’s a choice of a mode of being.