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.