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.