I’m returning to “Salvos” because there are several things that I find both interesting and funny.

For instance, there’s the “Princess Salvos” running gag, which started in the second book, when Salvos discovered that Nobles and Royalty exist, and she liked the idea of being better than everybody else and addressed with respect, obeyed and so on, and she also liked how fancy Saffron looked, so she started playing a Princess, especially when they saved Rachel from the brink of being used as a human sacrifice to summon demons; essentially, Salvos, at her estimated two years of age was of similar emotional maturity as the little girl at the age of eight or so. The “Princess” thing was initially embarrassing more than either credible or cute, since she always had her clothes torn and dirty after having finished some battle or another, and she was also permanently broke. As she continues calling herself a Princess, after having prestigious Titles, achievements and levels, the thing becomes credible enough that people like Rowyn Ino, the Emperor of the Inorian Empire, doesn’t bat an eye on it and just assumes it’s literally true – after all, she is a nigh-Elite super-Mage, a Diamond ranked Secily’s Sentinel, who single-handedly mopped the floor with multiple Archdemons and Diamond-ranked Warriors and Mages, looking so overpowered while doing it that she didn’t even break a sweat. That she would be a Princess of some kingdom sounded quite reasonable in context. The funny thing is that her companions basically go after her and correct her, thinking she’s making a fool of herself, as she in fact was initially, but as time went by, the joke started sounding like the real thing… and then at lvl. 150 she evolved and her subspecies was “Angelic Devil Princess”, giving her an actual claim to the title… and then later, in the Netherworld, she finds out that her adoptive father is actually Samuel the Devil King, of the First Demon Kingdom, fifty thousand years ago, and she, as his daughter, is an actual Princess. It’s no longer a game – but nobody in the Mortal Realm knows it. They have various ideas about it; her companions think it’s all fake, while others think it’s true, but she must be the renegade daughter of the Demon King, meaning Regnorex, which is wrong, but actually closer to reality than her companions know. They still think she’s messing around and playing a Princess without an actual claim, while she in fact has the oldest claim in the world, older than all the human kingdoms and empires.

While we’re at Regnorex and his kingdom, it turned out that his kingdom is a thousand miles across, which makes it the size of Motharis Mountain Range. Considering how the humans believe that his kingdom encompasses the entirety of the Netherworld, it’s actually funny how small it is. He’s by no means a planar ruler. Samuel, however, was. His kingdom spanned the entirety of the Netherworld, and all its layers… before the fall, and the end of the world. Samuel also hinted that Regnorex is a fake king, which made me think – at the Primeval evolution, the Demons with Grand Skills and special achievements get a Hellprince/Hellprincess evolution; Salvos thus got the “Angelic Devil Princess” unique evolution, and also a second species of a Lesser God. What if Regnorex got a “King of Demons” or “Hellking” evolution at lvl. 200, and took it too seriously in his megalomania and conceit? What if his “kingdom” is merely a Domain? After all, when Salvos entered it, the notification said Now Entering [Demon King’s Domain]. It didn’t say “Now Entering [Demon Kingdom]”. When she entered her father’s fallen kingdom, the notification said Now Entering [Dungeon: Remnants of the First Demon Kingdom]. A logical conclusion, assuming Melas didn’t make an accidental mistake here, and I don’t think he did, would be that Samuel the Devil was the actual planar King, while Regnorex is merely an extremely pompous wannabe and an upstart; he’s no more a King than the “King of Chimeras” is a King. Basically, -King suffix is merely how the System calls the subspecies of Primordial Demons who have Grand Skills and special achievements.

Also, there’s the implication that he owes his entire career to a fortunate series of events and little to no achievements of his own. We know that Focalor, one of Samuel’s old subjects, refused to give up hope that his beloved King would return, and sent his enslaved Primordial Demons to either defend the position against the end of the world in the lower layers, like Hydra, Frenzied Basilisk and, apparently, Belphegor, using his soul magic Skill; also, he sent Paimon the Slave, lvl. 203, to kill all Demons at the cusp of the Primordial evolution, apparently so that Samuel wouldn’t lose his Title. Paimon apparently did so for a while, until she got so disgusted at her role in this senseless murder, that she refused to kill Jofis, committed assisted suicide allowing him to level from her death and become a Hellking, if only he promised to kill Focalor, which he of course did. The next thing we know is that Focalor, chained, wordless and enslaved by Regnorex, defeats Jofis easily, and Jofis loses his Title, his Evolution, and becomes a Disgraced Hellking, while Regnorex takes over and assumes the position of the Demon King.

This, however, is all highly suspicious, for several reasons. First, Regnorex doesn’t allow his subjects to evolve to Primordial and kills them if they do; this is very different from Samuel, whose followers (de facto ministers) were mostly all Primordials, and not only was he not threatened by that or lose his Title, but they all worshipped the ground he walked on and would never even consider deposing him. The fact that Focalor killed all pretenders to the throne ten thousand years after the fall, and Belphegor kept working on delaying the end of the world in his doomed tomb, dreaming of his King and the old times before the fall, says enough. Regnorex lives in constant fear of his subjects, because he rules by fear and an iron fist. Samuel ruled through respect, love, admiration and freedom, and was one of the best – if not the best – rulers Nexeus ever saw. Also, I have a hunch that Regnorex might be weak.

You see, we never learn his actual level, and Manos the Executioner, lvl. 197, one of his main generals, admits he doesn’t know Regnorex’s level. This is highly suspicious, because if his level was great, Regnorex would show it for the sake of intimidation. Since he doesn’t, and instead hides it with magic, there must be a reason for that, and the most obvious reason would be to hide how weak he actually is. So, how would that work? Well, my reconstruction goes somewhat like this. Regnorex evolved to Demon King evolution at lvl. 200, or even 195, because the Devil punks him about something related to lvl. 200 and ascending to a Lesser God at 200, and it seems to strike close to home, making Regnorex annoyed, but since we don’t know the underlying facts we also can’t appreciate the joke. So let’s say Regnorex evolved to Primordial, and then Focalor himself came to deal with him, cursing him with something like “shut up and be my slave”, firing off a Skill, and apparently Regnorex is one of those Demons of Wrath who as a matter of their biology rebound all offensive magic back to the sender, and so the curse rebounded at Focalor, making him both mute and in chains as an outward manifestation of his enslavement, and Regnorex, to no particular credit of his own, got himself a tool of conquest, and we see him use Focalor to fight all his important battles while he just looks stern, cruel and self-important. Focalor must be extremely high in level, since he was a Primordial fifty thousand years ago. He’s probably as high in level as Belphegor, who is higher than the Great Agarus, because Salvos can identify lvl. 225 Great Agarus, and can’t identify Belphegor. Haec, too, couldn’t identify Focalor. This means that Regnorex likely owes all his fame to this fortunate turn of events, and if Salvos manages to break Focalor’s curse, Regnorex is fucked, because I can imagine Focalor not liking his eon-long enslavement. If, however, Salvos can’t break Focalor’s curse, she’s in much more trouble than she suspects.

So, after the level of the Matriarch Centinel was revealed to be an incredibly high lvl. 238, we still don’t know the levels of the Beast, Regnorex, Focalor, Belphegor, Devil, Spirit Lord, Fairy Queen and the Archangel. I would cluster most of them between 240 and 250, but that’s merely a guess.

So, the list of things her human companions don’t know about Salvos is substantial. They don’t know almost anything about her being the Devil’s daughter, the extent of their actual relationship, and especially the fact that he’s the former King of Netherworld, and that this makes Salvos an actual Princess. By the time she returns to the Mortal Realm, that might make for some funny conversations.

As for her return, her point of return used to be her lair, but this was thoroughly nuked in the opening salvo of the fight between Sally and Matriarch Centinel. However, Sally opened a link to Salvos through the Dreaded Goblet, so I suspect the Goblet is currently the endpoint of the link Salvos can follow to the Mortal Realm. Sally gave the Goblet to her clone along with the gravely injured Rachel, and they all managed to return safely to the Mavos Academy, where Sally’s clone died along with Sally, Rachel is in deep shock because she got Sally killed, Clayton is in deep shock and barely responsive because he saw Matriarch Centinel use Corruption to disrupt the magical barrier, he saw the Endlands in her mind, and he saw the Edithe/Archangel hybrid appear and fight, and he basically lost his shit temporarily, and the Dreaded Goblet is on the ground. I don’t actually expect any of them to pay attention to it, but it’s the obvious point where Salvos opens a portal to the Mortal Realm, because she had a live link to Sally through it.

I expect Salvos to come to the Mavos Academy as soon as she’s physically able, and I expect her to bring along a few very high levelled Demons, and a very high levelled Hartia the Fallen Fairy. After the initial shock, I would expect them to get along nicely with Clayton and some other humans, but we already know that a lot of professors there hate Demons enough to deface the monument to Salvos and others who were lost defending agains the Demon invasion. I would expect them to resign, and the vacancies to be filled by Demons. Bertrugil, for instance, already looks very much like a professor – lazy, snarky and irritable. He could teach the history and structure of the Netherworld, as well as the biology of Demons and their evolutions. Hartia could teach space magic, being a major expert at the subject, and also being snarky, irritable and unpleasant enough to be a great professor material. But if Manos the Executioner gets a tenure, I’ll lose my shit. 🙂

Samuel and Belphegor are currently in an incredibly vulnerable position, right next to the Wall of Infinite Corruption, also known as the end of the world. If Regnorex’s sacrificial ritual for breaking the structural wall between Netherworld and the Mortal Realm indeed breaks the Nexeus, or at least contributes to the Corruption, those two will find themselves facing something that can no longer be contained, and they could actually die, which would be a shame, because Salvos loves both of them and cares for them a great deal. Their loss would be tragic, after all they had to endure.

As for Regnorex being a joke, we learned that he wants to live in the Mortal Realm like a Mortal, and the only thing he can think of is go there, kill everybody and “netherform” the place to look like a barren wasteland he came from. Essentially, he wants to escape the Netherworld, but he carries the worst aspects of it with him wherever he goes. Salvos, on the other hand, developed her kindness, empathy and sophistication in her relation with the Mortals to the point where she befriended a few Elves and Kobolds, and progressed in her rank within the human society to the point where she’s a decorated honorary Noble in the Vaun Qieur Empire, she is friendly with lots of Kings and Nobles, all the Vampire Nobles see her as one of their own, she is allied with Hadrian’s company, and was one of the leading generals of the army assembled to fight the Demon invasion. She’s seen as one of the Elite adventurers, one of the Archmages, not to forget that she’s as wealthy as a small country and her name instantly opens all doors.

Basically, Regnorex repeatedly failed to win with violence and terror what Salvos won with goodness, diligent work and saving people’s lives from all kinds of evils, Demons first and foremost. The irony is, she didn’t even have to try directly. She just protected the people she cared for, and levelled by killing harmful things. Where Regnorex tries to break open the doors, for Salvos they open effortlessly. She can visit the Kobolds, the Elves and the Humans any day, and she will find friends there. Her track record is so incredibly positive, that even her enemies can’t find anything to object, and instead make shit up. Basically, she appeared in the Human Lands, and immediately killed a rampaging Demon. Then she destroyed a den of Cultists. Then she made the first report of Belzu gathering an army, and assisted the Valiant Dreamers, who are known for their kindness and optimism, which says a lot about her character. Then she goes to the Plaguelands, levels to Diamond rank, and kills the Lich, becoming instantly famous. Then she goes to Mavos Academy and studies advanced subjects. She kills an Ancient Centinel in the Bloodied Gulf and gets the Title of Secily’s Sentinel, with two Grand Skills and Divinity. She kills a horde of Demons in Elutra. Protects the Noble Families against Demons who try to kill them. Kills most Demons sieging Alyras. She fights Belzu, multiple times, eventually wins. Fights a Hellabomination lvl. 180. Recruits Clayton Skyshredder to the war against the Demons. Wins multiple crucial battles in the war against overpowering foes. Saves everybody by sacrificing herself in the end. Essentially, she’s the brightest star and the most heroic figure they have ever seen, and the account of her deeds would seem like embellished fiction were it not verifiably true. And the fact she revealed herself to be a Demon made everybody lose their shit. The entire civilization is in turmoil over her. How can a Demon possibly be such a heroic figure?

And, also, she doesn’t look or feel anything like a Demon. All the Demons, even the Changelings who can look like very beautiful Mortals, make people’s skin crawl, because they have an aura of cold malice and evil about them. Salvos, on the other hand, was always beautiful in her human form, but not only did she become completely indistinguishable from a Human, even bleeding human blood when injured, but her aura is that of uplifting courage, inspiration and kindness. She’s not someone who creeps people out, she makes everybody inspired and uplifted, and leaves a trail of positively changed lives and people who look up to her. Sure, she also annoys a few fools, but that is always inevitable if you’re virtuous. Also, unlike other Demons, people are not afraid of her, sometimes to a fault, because Amanda needs to be taught a lesson after being a bitch with Salvos too many times. When she suddenly arrives to a fight, people feel relief and gratitude, not sudden fear. Wherever she goes, she’s a great force of Light against whatever Darkness that happens to threaten. She’s someone who first brought the Frost Wyverns to the brink of extinction when they threatened the Human Lands, but then adopted three baby Wyverns as her own children and protected them. The System evaluated her role and Titled her the guardian of the continent of Secily, and for good reason, because the description is apt. She would say that she doesn’t care about anything but herself and her companions, but that’s not what it looks like. To the outsiders, she’s someone who fights high levelled Kobold invaders and then saves a little girl from a magically frozen house and brings her back to her mother. She’s someone who spent a dozen Platinum on educational tools when tutoring struggling students at school. She’s someone who flew into a war zone to save her roommate’s family, and then ended up fighting Belzu, the nigh-invincible calamity destroying the country, to protect their retreat. She’s someone who comes into a desperate situation and her arrival means you’re saved. She might have other interpretations for her actions, but from where other people are looking, it looks very much like she’s some kind of a Guardian Angel of Light, and her Title, Subspecies and second Species confirm this. Secily’s Sentinel, Angelic Devil Princess, Lesser God. You don’t get those for being a selfish person, which is how she thinks of herself; but her selfishness always turns out to be defence of something or someone she loves. The mortally wounded Belzu told her they are similar – both guided by selfishness, and she countered – no, because I am Salvos, while you are Belzu. Her selfishness means protection and care, and his selfishness means murder and pillage.

And so, now Regnorex intends to break the walls of the Mortal Realm so that he can freely invade it with his horde that knows so little about being a Mortal that they wear pants on their heads because they heard that Humans wear clothes, while the person with the Title of Enemy of the Demon King is such an expert on the Mortal Realm that she taught the ancient lore of the Kobolds to an assembly of the human Elites.

That’s going to be fun, when they meet.

I’m not done yet. 🙂

I know it’s a projection. I like the series because I identify with the main character and I project a future for the character that I hope to have personally. It’s fucking obvious, after all. I mean, you have a character who wakes up as a demon larva in a total shithole, and understands that she needs to get stronger if she wants to be more of herself, and I project a future where she gets her old memories and self back, only upgraded by her new experiences. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what I’m doing here. Of course the main character is nothing like me in many ways, but I don’t care as long as I see the main trend of similarity; basically, someone threw you into a pit, you have no memories other than the desire for something you feel you should be but can’t access, and it powers all your efforts to dig yourself out. And, of course, the stronger the soul, the stronger the drive.

Also, I somewhat envy the simplicity and clarity of the system. To Salvos, you just need to kill progressively stronger enemies, and you level. Of course, you need to make choices that determine what kind of a person you end up being, but still, it’s incredibly straightforward. Here, it’s all vague, unclear, indistinct, and the actual method of spiritual evolution is hidden under seven veils and I had to figure it out myself; everything everybody thinks is superficial and more harmful than useful. So, it’s much harder than merely killing monsters 20 levels above you, which is why I envy the system from the books and this envy feeds the appeal.

I also like that the author doesn’t sexualise it. In lots of modern stuff I encountered everything seems to be about sex, and everything else looks like merely ways to package sex. It’s boring, and it hides absence of actual ideas. Here, this part was marginalised and this brings everything else to the surface – the way characters think and feel about all sorts of things. Conversations aren’t merely a way to get to the romantic part; they are the actual point. When someone like Orgaf admires Salvos, he does so because of her achievements – she killed the Lich of the Plaguelands. He saw her fight a Hellabomination that was an evolution and over 40 levels above her. He saw her turn back time in order to land a hit on Belzu, he saw her endure and keep fighting after almost getting killed, and after he himself almost gave up. He saw her kill Ira, whom he fought and lost badly, barely surviving the casual encounter. He saw how she spent the last drops of her potion of regeneration to revive him after he was almost killed, and they were in a rough spot at the moment, where he knew her secret and it wasn’t certain to her that he would protect it; it would have been so easy for her to just let him die or finish him herself; instead, she had him nurtured to full strength and left Willy to care for him. The characters are admired for their actions, and when a meritocrat like Orgaf, who spent his entire life killing monsters in various dark dens, searching for treasures to loot, and who is known for speaking about lvl. 100-149 people as “those useless Diamonds” is fangirling over Salvos, you know he has good reasons for it. Also, when Helena Warshade (I internally call her Helena Ravenclaw for obvious reasons), who is Clayton’s equal in magical power and one of the two highest ranked human Mages, and who actually doesn’t like Salvos very much and is very skeptical of her, teams up with Orgaf and Salvos to deal with shit, you know it’s been earned. There’s no stupid artificial sexual tension or jealousy or rivalry interposed in the plot to cloud the important matters. I mean, sure, it exists, in case of Amanda who has a crush on Daniel and is jealous of Salvos and it’s completely obvious, but it’s very localised. It has a function within the plot; the plot isn’t a mere instrument to sell you the sexual content. That’s very realistic, in fact, despite the modern opinion that sex is the main thing people are concerned with, and everything else is merely a way to package it. I am honestly glad to have found a piece of modern literature that contextualises sex and romance properly, instead of drowning everything in it, the way processed food is drowned in sugar. It’s there because somewhere in the margins Edithe is having a romantic relationship with Hadrian, Daniel has a crush on Salvos which she takes nine books to figure out and only with Amanda’s help, and so on, but it’s one thing among twenty, and prioritised below top ten. The important parts aren’t when someone had sex, they are when they figured something out, overcame something important, when something was revealed that changes everything, or when someone saved a friend from mortal danger at great cost and hazard to themselves. The scenes when Salvos is half-dead from pushing a Skill too far and is completely incapacitated and in excruciating pain, and her companions carry her, protect her and deal with shit for her are much more important and telling. For instance, the journey of Edithe from “Demon! Let’s kill it!” when she first met Salvos, through hostility, guarded tolerance, cautious friendship, to profound friendship that developed in the Plaguelands, where Salvos kept saving her life every moment of every day and twice brought her back from the brink of death and mortal danger at extreme cost to herself where she lost her wings, an arm and almost her life fighting an almost unkillable foe because he had Edithe hostage and was going to kill her the way he killed all those other redheads over the centuries. It starts with Edithe being very reluctant to put Salvos on guard duty, because Demon, to Edithe carrying the wounded Salvos in her arms and protecting her with her life. It’s stuff that develops over nine books of material, very gradually. You don’t get cheap stuff here – no easy rewards, no deep emotions that develop overnight for no good reason. You have deep history between the characters who don’t start as friends. Things don’t just happen. Salvos’ roommate in Mavos Academy wants to kill her when she finds out she’s a Demon, and it takes quite a lot of work for Salvos to get past the dangerous point, and after that there’s lots of suspicion before they get to the point where Saffron would throw herself into fire for Salvos. It takes multiple books to get there. They get to know each other and become friends in book two. By book nine, Salvos is the point of inspiration of Saffron’s entire family; they all look up to her and try to live up to her example, after she saved their lives multiple times with acts of outright heroism. It’s not cheaply earned acclaim; it’s someone flying into the heart of the worst battle in the world at that point to save your family from certain death, and then gets you all out and stays to deal with things, and then things like that keep repeating until you all owe your lives to her ten times over. It’s earned, it’s solid “show, not tell” writing style over multiple volumes. Salvos didn’t just accidentally get famous over one event. It’s multiple instances where she fought, lost, fought again, and barely won, saving people who watched and told stories later. For instance, there’s a group of three adventurers she meets in the second book, and whom we follow through the books at the margins of events, who are so inspired by her that they keep looking up to her and doing more daring things to rise up, because next time they meet, they want her to be proud of them; she, in return, saves their lives on multiple occasions because she remembered them.

Also, there’s the sophisticated arc with the Devil, who looks like a crazy person alleviating his eternal boredom by messing with people when we first meet him; dangerous, deranged, nigh-omnipotent mythical being. He first takes notice of Salvos, then gets to like her, then as he mentors her he develops true feelings for her and adopts her as his daughter, and she’s first annoyed by him but respects him, and then as he helps her develop two grand skills and twenty levels, she feels true gratitude and love for him, and that has so much power that it starts to heal his broken soul, eventually succeeding, and she’s the first person in 50000 years that actually reached him. Also, it’s an arc from book two to book eleven. It’s not some cheap trick, not something that just happens because reasons. She begins by being his dupe, and ends up being his true family.

As I said, “Salvos” is not what one would think it is. It’s deep stuff packaged in shallow nonsense, not the other way around, as it unfortunately tends to be the case with much of literature.

I want to return to the “Salvos” series because I don’t think I’m done with it here.

One of the reason why it’s so good is that the characters break their own mould; they belie expectations. For instance, you would expect that Salvos, as a Demon of Pride, would act in ways a typical prideful person will act, but she’s actually humble. When Willy berates her and she knows he’s right, she will just bow her head, take it and apologise. When Lux Golmi berates her for breaking into its home to kill it for body parts she needs for a potion, and accuses her of being wild, she actually stops, thinks about it and feels shame, because she can understand the “monster’s” perspective and it isn’t flattering. She then offers a compromise and there ends up being no violence. You would expect a proud powerful person to laugh at such criticism, act arrogantly and just take what they want, but Salvos never does. When Haec berates her for hiding corruption from him and doing things behind his back, she again bows her head and apologises. So, her pride is not what people usually mean by it; arrogance, rejection of all criticism, being convinced of your own superiority despite evidence. For Salvos, pride means being great and doing great things and then soaking up deserved praise. Pride is being loved and trusted by worthy people because you are worthy. Pride is not allowing threats to harm what is yours. But when she fucks up and someone gives her a piece of their mind about it, you would expect her to act like those people we all know, who would just arrogantly tell you to fuck off and it’s not your place to say anything. Not Salvos. Salvos believes in reality over everything else. If you believe something about yourself, you have to prove it. If you fucked up and somebody proves it to you, you need to accept your mistakes and do better. Defending your flaws isn’t her kind of pride. Her kind of pride is not having flaws in the first place, and then being admired for it. So, since that’s what she loves, she works on not having those flaws. She doesn’t like being looked down upon for being weak, so she works on being strong. Essentially, she has a constructive approach to things; see what you like, and become the kind of person who deserves it.

Also, one would expect that her pride would demand her to always want a leadership position, but that’s not the case. She’s perfectly satisfied to be the most powerful person in a group, and have someone else lead; whether it’s Helena or Clayton or Haec, it doesn’t matter. She’s more interested in getting things done. On a superficial level, she likes the concept of a cheering crowd or having minions who worship her, but she would get bored of it very quickly, and she usually prefers a much different environment – a company of equals who each have a say, who have opinions, fears and desires she acknowledges and accommodates. She doesn’t want power in order to be a tyrant like Regnorex; in that sense, she’s very much like Samuel, who made a kingdom of equals, people who were joking and messing around with each other and who all had great power, but nobody saw the power of others as a threat that needs to be controlled, the way Regnorex doesn’t allow his minions to evolve to Primordial because he fears being deposed. Samuel’s kingdom was full of Primordials, and they absolutely loved him. They worshipped the ground he walked on. He gave them safety, purpose, peace and hope where there used to be chaos, despair and death. When Trico betrayed them and everything collapsed, including Samuel’s heart, they hoped for 50000 years that he would return to his kingdom and lead them all again. Samuel didn’t need fear to rule, and neither does Salvos.

Even people who barely know her, like Bertrugil, trust her and feel safe with her because they see how she deals with things. They feel safe enough to whine and complain to her. Nobody feels safe with Regnorex that way. People walk on tiptoes around him and constantly bow in submission to appease his ego. Nobody does that around Salvos; instead, Aemula feels safe enough to complain that Salvos doesn’t believe her when she says she can see solid ground, and Salvos is careful not to hurt her feelings. Mind you, Aemula is a lvl. 108 Archdemon. Salvos is at that point a lvl. 165 Lesser God. They are all in Salvos’ pocket space, travelling between the folds of Nexeus, and everybody feels perfectly safe. Aemula whines about not being taken seriously and then rubs it in Salvos’ face when she turns out to be right, Bertrugil sleeps, Taburas broods, Haec is having his evolution in peace. They are all within a construct of space magic created by a Lesser God and they are not walking on tiptoes around her. For a supposed Demon of Pride, Salvos has almost none of what people would call “ego”. Sure, there’s pride in her own achievements, there’s a desire to be great and to be seen as great, to be admired by worthy people who see her greatness and acknowledge it, the pride of truth being said about it and this truth being high praise. Most of it, however, is constructive. She did have some detours into the pathological, such as when she was tutoring other kids and it went into her head, but for the most part, it’s pride of the kind where she doesn’t allow people she loves to be harmed, where she doesn’t allow there to be a power higher than herself that could take all she loves away from her. That’s why the character and the writing are interesting; you don’t expect the Demon of Pride to act mostly as a Goddess of Love.

That, among other things, is why the humans in the Mortal Realm are currently losing their shit over her. They have an expectation of what Demons should be like – Lucerna who rampaged across Nixa, destroying towns and killing people. Belzu who did the same but more effectively, killing millions and razing entire countries. Servants of Regnorex who invaded Inor and Elutra, destroying everything and sacrificing the population to bring in more Demons and eventually the Demon King himself. The fact that the carefree girl who kept destroying all harmful creatures, who was known for killing the Centinels, the undead, the Demons and the cultists who created mischief, who did so many protective and good things that the System gave the Title of “Secily’s Sentinel”, making her essentially the official protector of their world, who fought so hard to defeat the Demon invasion that she brought them all together and didn’t rest until they all focused their efforts to defeat the threat, and was one of their greatest generals and arguably the person most responsible for the victory, the fact that she turned out to be a Demon herself, and not just any demon, but a Primeval Demon who was also a Lesser God who radiated Divinity like the Watcher, Mori Gladius and the Immortal King Alexander – they didn’t know what to do with that. Some tried to argue that it all had to be some deception, but it made absolutely no sense. The alternative was that a Demon can be good, and not just good, but the best person in the world, and that broke their minds even worse because it contradicted everything they knew about Demons. Demons aren’t supposed to have angelic wings, radiate Divinity and make the world safe from threats and evil. The Demons aren’t supposed to have the “aura” Salvos has – something that makes you mildly euphoric, something that makes you want to rise up, earn greatness, leave fears and limitations behind you. Demons aren’t supposed to inspire, elevate, and bring knowledge and peace. Clayton knew she wasn’t human, but his first guess was that she’s a Spirit, because that’s what she feels like. There’s an aura of levity, kindness, protectiveness and inspiration around her, and his suspicion was that she’s either a rogue Spirit, or the Spirit Lord is up to something. Even when he met the Devil in his human form, he felt nothing like what he would expect a Demon to feel like. I honestly can’t imagine what he would have thought; there’s a being that’s extremely powerful, throws one of his professors out the window to prove a point, and then calmly allows Clayton to lead them out of his school without offering resistance, and all the while Clayton is probing him with Identification and who knows what Skills and learns only that he’s the equivalent of a human Elite, but nothing more. The combination of power, mischief and benevolence makes him suspect Spirits, because that’s what people would logically think. Their experience with Demons consists of either Regnorex and his minions, or rogue but evil Demons like Belzu, whose idea of levelling is to raze towns and kill people. When they encounter a Demon whose idea of levelling is to find some wasteland full of wild creatures nobody will miss and kill them, and then go to school to learn magic, their experience offers no guidance that would explain this. And yet, she’s not as unique as they would think; it’s just that Regnorex has been shaping Demons into what they are now for the last 10000 years. The Humans don’t know about the First Kingdom of Samuel the Devil King, who ruled with inspiration, kindness and vision, not fear. Salvos is merely someone who would fit right in with Samuel’s old people, to the point where he ends up actually adopting her as his daughter, and she instantly befriends his viceroy Belphegor when they meet. Humans think Regnorex and his Demons are typical, but they are merely a pathological branch that’s been developing for a long time, and they have a short historical memory.

Humans call the Demons a scourge of the Nexeus, but the Demons used to hang around freely with Spirits, Dragons, High Elves and ancient Humans. They explored sophisticated magic, participated in sophisticated world politics and were seen as merely another species. In fact, Kobolds see Demons as not much different than Spirits; Elves have little to no idea about them, and no prejudice. It’s just Humans that have a problem with… well, everybody except the Spirits, in fact. So, if something is alien but good, it must be a Spirit. Humans, in fact, have a thick wall of prejudice against Demons, that Salvos has to overcome each time with them, but which doesn’t exist with any other species. She befriended a Fairy, a Kobold, multiple Elves, a Spirit and multiple monsters, but with Humans it’s always “Demon! Let’s kill it!” at first. Centina has a similar situation where everybody hates the Centinels, but in both cases, you can’t say the prejudice is unwarranted. The Centinels just kill everything and are completely irrational, and Demons occasionally pop up in the human lands and just kill everyone indiscriminately. Both species are terrible pests that ravage the Human lands. So, why would there not be prejudice against them? There’s 10000 years of history behind the prejudice, and no known exceptions. And Salvos has to concede that. She hates being looked down upon for being a Demon, but when she sees what other Demons are doing there, she can’t blame the humans for drawing the obvious conclusions. Instead, she turns her rage at Regnorex, whose fault it truly is. She’s not stupid the way humans would be, and ask not to be discriminated against as if it were a right. No, she puts real effort into making things right first, and then hopes to be judged fairly.

So, as you can see, it’s this complexity and nuance of the whole thing that I find fascinating.

As a continuation of the previous article, that did make me think why I like some books and characters, while I absolutely detest others.

If a character doesn’t function in a way that makes sense, if they don’t act realistically in their circumstances, if they don’t act realistically for their intelligence, level of knowledge and so on, I just can’t abide them. For instance, Amelia is one such character. She is incredibly obstinate and stupid, and simply refuses to draw the most reasonable and logical conclusions from her circumstances and the situation she’s in, and deliberately acts in the most inappropriate and unreasonable manner, refusing to learn and understand what the reality is telling her. It’s absolutely jarring. Edward Cullen, in the “Twilight” series, is another such character that’s getting on my nerves, because he obstinately refuses to learn what reality is telling him, refuses to listen to smart people, tries to control other people’s destiny in ways that make everybody miserable, and for what – he has a fixed set of ideas about selfishness and refuses to revise them despite quite obvious lessons that present themselves. Basically, it’s a character that refuses to accept God’s providence and his own feeling of rightness because he’s overriding it with his own intellectual concepts as if they were God. As a result, he almost gets everybody killed and creates an incredible amount of suffering. As I said, I absolutely revile the character.

Martin Riggs from “Lethal Weapon” is the opposite. I love that character. He’s incredibly fucked up when we first encounter him. His wife died in a car accident and she was all he had. He’s suicidal, in permanent emotional anguish, and he’s stumbling through that and trying to do his job as a policeman, hoping to die a hero fighting armed criminals, but somehow always manages to survive and defeat them, because he’s both lucky and good at his job. He’s great at killing people, and yet he only wishes he could have his wife back, and he can’t, so killing himself to be with her is the only thing he can think of. Gradually, as he helps his partner save his family, he finds purpose and comes out on the other side of his terrible grief. It’s an incredibly realistic portrait of a virtuous person experiencing terrible tragedy and trying to pick up the pieces of their life, sort themselves out and find new purpose, while life doesn’t wait for them and instead showers them with an avalanche of rocks.

I love characters that are normally preoccupied with their own stuff, but when a crisis happens, they rise up to the occasion and do whatever the situation requires to resolve things. I find the fumbling, insecure, weak people who get confused and do pathetic or evil things to cover up their failings jarring and abhorrent. I just can’t identify with that; also, all the people I hold in contempt are like that. Weak, no responsibility, no accountability, projection, justification of failings, failure to learn and improve. Yuck.

I can identify with Salvos who woke up completely ignorant in a strange world and is trying to create more of the good stuff that she can comprehend, and fight the bad stuff she encounters. She figures things out as she goes, she never has it easy, almost everything is against her, but she’s inherently virtuous, and she’s virtuous by choice. She could choose evil, but she didn’t, and it’s not an accident that she didn’t. She just abhors certain things as a matter of principle. She theoretically could level by killing as many people as she can find, especially if nobody would know. However, she never does. Her moral core is so strong, that a monster can put her to shame by stating that she came to its home and is trying to kill it in order to harvest its body parts, and for no good reason other than her selfish ones. She really stops to think about it, and changes her opinion and actions. This is a realistic way a virtuous person would act. They don’t automatically know things because they are virtuous. Their idea of virtue needs to evolve; you can’t just put a label of “monster” on a category of beings and then treat them like non-entities, especially when they think, feel and offer good points, they didn’t attack you to justify your response, and you invaded their home in order to murder them. She does the “oh wait, that’s not actually a good thing to do, is it?”, and then she acts upon this realisation. She does what a smart, good person would do.

Edithe is also a very believable character. At one point she tells Salvos to ignore what people think because people are idiots, to which Salvos responds “but you did something like that, too”. Edithe replies “Yes, and by people being idiots I mean myself in particular. I was an idiot and you showed me that I was wrong. That’s just how it is”. I like that – no self-justification, no holding on to past mistakes. You fix it, and you realise it was wrong and you were an idiot. You don’t keep being an idiot just to keep pretence that you were born smart.

So, in essence, the characters I love aren’t those who were born smart and omnipotent and can solve all problems with a flick of the wrist. It’s not a situation I can identify with. I can, however, identify with people who are forced to figure it out as they go, they have strong principles about what’s wrong, and keep revising ideas about what’s good and right as they evolve. Also, I love characters who focus under pressure, and can’t stand those who fall apart under it. I can’t stand “comedies” where everybody is confused, virtueless and fumbles and acts sinfully under pressure. I’d rather have my nails pulled than watch those. Things where someone experiences difficulty and tragedy, but gets their shit together and rises up to the occasion, those are my cup of tea.

I love characters that just get shit done. A good example is Eric Northman from “True Blood”. He sees a problem, he sees that he should do something about it, and then his actions look like a mathematical tree-balancing solution. He takes what he needs, does what needs to be done, tries to get maximum good with the least amount of bad side effects, and then just goes on with business as usual. His actions are determined by the needs of a situation, not his own egotistical considerations. In that, he’s the polar opposite of Edward Cullen, who’s trying to be good so hard, he ends up causing disaster after disaster.

Obviously, I identify with characters who embody things I can personally identify with. I can identify with being in all kinds of disasters and ignorance and trying to figure things out from scratch. I can identify with fucking things up and then learning from it and trying better next time. Basically, it’s the characters that are similar to myself, or at least how I want to be, and how I want to react in difficult situations. If I can’t see myself in a character, if I can’t see myself making their choices, I nope the fuck out.

The first thing one would probably ask me when they found out I read all those Salvos books is why? Why do I like it? What’s even good about it?

It’s easy to find parts that deserve criticism. For instance, the characters are written in annoying anime/manga ways; hysterical behaviour, immature stuff that’s supposed to be cute and it’s actually incredibly cringeworthy, author’s tendency to write only female lead characters while male characters look like fumbling fools who couldn’t tie their shoelaces without a female and so on. There’s lots of stuff not to like, and I actually don’t like it either. Also, not all of Melas’ writing is equally good. Some is outright terrible, especially when he tries too hard to be comical. “Amelia”, for instance, is a clusterfuck. It’s almost on top of my list of shittiest writing and dumbest characters in all of literature, and considering how many books I’ve read, that’s truly something. It’s almost as if he was kidnapped and waterboarded by inane, infantile worshippers of manga tropes and forced to write what they thought was hilariously funny good stuff without all that serious shit they don’t care for. Also, it’s almost as if he’s trying very hard to include all kinds of woke bullshit tropes in order not to offend American college audience. Basically, invert male and female typical roles, make most powerful characters gay, make everything that resembles Christianity look like the worst hypocritical bad guys and make Demons good. Sure, I get it, he’s being so progressive and radical in his thinking, it’s almost as if he’s thinking the same things as every stupid kid these days. Yawn.

The authors create characters that feel like themselves; I get it. Greg Bear and Stanislaw Lem write characters that all feel like IQ 150 physicists. Atheists can’t write good religious characters to save their life, because they don’t understand enough to do so. Gentry Lee writes every character as an intelligent person that was profoundly fucked up in some way and then tries to work their life around the fucked up place as a given, and manage symptoms with alcohol or something; it’s as if he was describing the JPL people in some bar in Pasadena. 🙂 Melas writes childish, immature characters who act in ways so hysterical and often stereotypical, it sometimes feels like drowning in a pool of cringe. It’s a lot to get used to, especially if you’re accustomed to reading sophisticated SciFi like Clarke, Lem, Asimov or Heinlein, or sophisticated fantasy like Tolkien or Zelazny. It’s as if there’s a whole subculture of worshipers of inane, hysterical, immature drivel, and Melas took care not to offend any of them by including all of it. So, now we have characters who drop to their knees in despair and pull their hair in anguish when issued a fine by the authorities. How mature.

But if that were all, I wouldn’t be reading it, would I?

“Salvos” is extremely appealing since the main characters are convincing and feel like real people with real problems they are trying to deal with in a reasonable way. Salvos herself wakes up without memories, without any idea about the world she’s in and the beings she encounters, and initially spends her points on trying to identify rocks, because she can’t believe they are all the same and hopes to find a special one. Then she meets others, and soon finds out that everybody is trying to kill each other in order to level, and encounters psychopaths, hapless victims, overpowering threats, and feels an urge to become more of herself, to rise up, to survive and, very soon thereafter, to surround herself with companions she can experience life with. She likes to be great, but in a very specific way – she wants to be great while surrounded by others she can share it all with. This is a particular distinction, because the books are full of people who are example of the opposite; they want to be great by being above everyone, by making everyone else a slave. Also, she develops an ethical worldview very quickly. She never attacks innocents, and never attacks first; she’s reactive in her violence. She tries to befriend someone first. In her worldview, there are wild demons and other wild things that just want to kill everything, and then there are “horned demons”, beings that pretend to be reasonable but are just as wild; the machiavellian psychopaths of the world, but she of course doesn’t have the term for it. When she accidentally falls through a portal into the Mortal Realm, her accidental encounter with Daniel is very inauspicious. She asks him to show her the way back to Netherworld and he tries to kill her because she’s a demon and must be guilty of everything he ever heard demons do wrong. She easily defeats him and knocks him out, and when he wakes up, disarmed, she berates him for attacking her with no reason instead of killing him. He then starts to figure out she’s not anywhere near what he thought, and starts helping her.

The world is not a trivial manga-fantasy trope. It kind of starts that way, but soon you figure out all kinds of complexity there, and it grows more complex as the main character moves in the world, learns more things and figures things out. It’s a gradual process; like seeing a child learn to walk, then run, then go get bread in the bakery independently, then go to school, and so on.

In the Mortal Realm, Salvos does something no demon ever seems to – she joins the human society and becomes a productive member. This is in part due to her own ethics, because she hates killing sentient beings but likes to level, and so she always finds some den of monsters that need to be eradicated, rather than do the easy thing and just kill random people. Her companions always start with “Demon! Let’s kill it!”, then she roughs them up a bit and they get to the “oh wait…” point, then they become hostile but tolerant, then friendly, and at some point when they really know her it becomes a bond of love and trust so strong, they would jump into fire for each other. For instance, Salvos never has to sleep, so she’s always on guard duty. Initially, her companions are very reluctant about it; oh great, let’s have the Demon on guard duty while we all sleep, what could go wrong. But eventually, Salvos on guard duty makes a zombie-infested swamp the safest place in the world, because they know they are the most precious thing in her life and she will literally go to the ends of the world to save them. They gradually understand that she just looks silly and childish, and that she’s in fact very methodical, calculated and strategic about her goals; it’s just that she was a literal baby when they originally met, and she had plenty of room to grow. And that she did. There are some things that never change about Salvos. She always wants to grow and become more. She wants to become powerful. She hates wild things. She forms deep interpersonal bonds. She’s incredibly loyal. She’s kind of terrible at explaining things to people in a gradual way that will get them to the same page. But she learns. She often starts as sucking terribly at something, then gets better, and then gets quite good at it, for instance navigation. Her manners suck, because she doesn’t understand why she shouldn’t just spit something out if she doesn’t like it, or make a scene if she feels like it. It’s normal to her to assume she should just do whatever she likes. It’s a hard habit for her to change, but she does change. The way that happens is realistic; it’s not just some sudden choice, but a very realistic thing, where something happens gradually as you figure it out piece by piece.

She officially joins human society at level 40, as a Gold ranked adventurer. The ranks are Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond and Elite. She rises through the ranks by killing monsters, cultists, demons and the undead. As she does, she becomes slightly famous at first, then very famous as the Liberator of the Plaguelands, and one of the most famous people in the world by the time she’s the Secely’s Sentinel. She joins Mavos Academy, the best magical school in human lands, and initially she struggles at everything. She gradually manages to read up to the point where she catches up with the lessons, then becomes a top student and even tutors others. It doesn’t just happen. We see the struggles, the hard work it takes.

She starts as an outcast, and gradually becomes a famous, incredibly highly esteemed adventurer within the human society, and one of its highest-ranked members. In the end, she’s one of humanity’s top generals in the fight against the Demon invasion. It’s all earned with hard work and lots of blood and sacrifice. She’s no Mary Sue; things don’t just work great for her because she’s Salvos. She gets her butt kicked more often than not. She gets cocky, and then something wrecks her so badly she barely escapes with her life. Sometimes, an enemy is so overpowering she loses and barely escapes multiple times as she levels, but it turns out not to be enough, and she has to change strategy, think things through and go through the entire heroic arc until she finally wins, and then it’s often nowhere near what she imagined at first.

She’s endearing because you can identify with her. She’s virtuous, but ignorant and she messes things up more often than not, then has to learn from the mistakes, pick herself up, understand what went wrong, and grow. She thinks growth means one thing, and then along the way it turns out to be five different things all at once, that she couldn’t even comprehend at the starting point. That stuff is very realistic. For instance, she thinks she has to learn space magic in order to travel back to the Netherworld back to Haec, and works hard to achieve it. However, along the way all kinds of things happen that complicate her understanding of what she’s even doing. For instance, as she grows to love her human companions, she can’t just leave them unprotected amidst an ongoing Demon invasion of the Mortal Realm in order to go back to her childhood friend. Her responsibilities get complicated. And she does learn responsibility. She is often chided by Edithe and Willy, the Grand Spirit of Diligence, and learns that she can’t just take off and leave whenever she doesn’t feel like doing something, because lives of other beings depend on her and she needs to learn true responsibility; and so she does. It’s a gradual change, but it’s also very realistic, with incremental steps of understanding and regression.

Salvos feels like a realistic, complex person, and not like some literary trope. Her world, the Nexeus, feels like a complex place with history, politics, ancient stuff that gets discovered and changes the way you see what’s going there. You have characters that look crazy, and you think they are one thing, and then you learn more and you understand that their crazy ramblings weren’t crazy at all; you just didn’t understand what’s going on. It’s complexity and nuance and sophistication wrapped inside superficial tropes. You think you’re reading a standard fantasy novel about a mage, a rogue and a warrior on their separate paths, joining forces to travel to a distant land, slay a dragon and achieve fame and fortune, and then stuff starts getting really sophisticated and you’re like “whoah, what is it that I’m actually reading here?”

So yeah, that’s why I like it.