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.

The entire “Salvos” series looks like a collection of post-modernist literary tropes, in a sense that everything is inverted. The protagonist is a Demon, the main antagonists resemble God and Church. Male characters look like they can’t tie their shoelaces without a “strong independent woman” showing them the way. The Hero is a confused, cowardly stereotype of a gen-z American college student whose girlfriend died in an accident doing something heroic and then he got depressed and wasted his life away, after which he got whisked into the Nexeus to fill the role of a Hero. People who are heroically trying to do “the right thing” invariably cause a mess and get themselves in a situation they shouldn’t have been in. It all looks like some kind of a literary form the author seems to be compelled to use, probably because he thinks his audience won’t buy it if it isn’t “edgy” enough, but the problem is, this form is so overused, it doesn’t feel edgy. It feels like a collection of foolish prejudice shared by children who haven’t read a single book that isn’t manga or something of that sort. For instance, the trope about the Christians and the Church as the nefarious bad guys pretending to be good originates from the propaganda that was spread by the Tokugawa shogunate since 1614, in a great persecution of the Catholic Church in Japan. Essentially, it’s propaganda that was spread by the actual villains, and it became part of the popular culture in Japan, and as such became a trope in anime and manga.

Also, the trope of casting the protagonists and strong characters as female is probably seen as sexy in the beta-male circles where they just want their mommy to take care of things because the world is hard and they are sad and depressed and their testosterone levels are insufficient for detection on the blood tests. So, the typical male and female roles are reversed, and to Melas’ credit, he makes characters work as people, except in case of Lofus the Broken Berserker, which is an extreme caricature of a boisterous hyper-masculine character that was cast as female, and it doesn’t work at all. However, other female characters work and feel like actual normal people, and there are no “Mary Sue” female characters who are magically great at everything because girl power. The female characters need to work for everything just like everybody else, and since magic is a major structural element of the world, sexual dimorphism doesn’t make the whole thing ridiculous the way it would here.

The reason why the whole thing works so well is that the initial setup creates a certain set of expectations, by setting the stage with the ridiculous set of supposedly subversive tropes, which makes you think you’re in for typical post-modernist deconstructionist nonsense, and then the author manages to completely subvert those expectations by creating a meritocratic world where neo-marxist tropes about species and groups within the world being neatly divided into oppressors and the oppressed fly straight into a brick wall. In fact, the typical collectivist ideas about saving the world and treating people as members of groups and categories rather than the individuals that they are, are put straight into the mouths of the greatest villains. Regnorex presents himself as offering salvation to Demonkind, leaving a trail of dead bodies and ashes behind him; he just gets all his followers killed, along with everybody else. Belzu, who killed millions and razed entire countries in the Human Lands also presents himself as a saviour of Demonkind from Regnorex and his rule. He also just gets everybody killed and manifests terrible evils in the world. The Spirit Lord has a grand plan of salvation, spanning millennia, and he seems to be the arch-villain of the series, bad enough that the Arcraem sent its Ordained Judge, the Archangel, to kill him. The Kobold sects who just fanatically kill everyone all think they are saving the world by doing it, and they think in strict categories. Even outside the series but still within the “Deltaverse”, Galgom the Tyrant of Utana presents himself as a saviour of that world, and Idu, the arch-villain of the Multiverse who destroyed countless worlds presents himself as the saviour of the Multiverse. It appears that every single psychotic mass-murderer sees himself as implementing a grand plan of salvation, while seeing people merely as members of categories, and never as individuals.

On the other hand, Salvos sees only individuals, to a fault; she literally has a problem understanding the abstract categories and their importance. She will save the world by accident, by simply wanting to save the dozen people she loves and the environment they need in order to exist. She has none of the neo-marxist traits of seeing the world through simplified groups of oppressors and the oppressed. In fact, the Humans are, as a group, absolutely the most hostile towards her of all she met in the entire world, and yet most of her beloved companions are Humans. They all start by wanting to kill her, then changing their minds, and eventually growing to love her. There is a wide pattern of the redemptive power of love and a good personal example that overcomes ingrained prejudice – for instance, the Vampires are indoctrinated into hating Demons for untold centuries, and yet, Salvos created such a strong personal example of goodness and kindness towards them, that for instance Saffron becomes her close friend and companion, and Hadrian has a crisis of worldview resulting in accepting Salvos, while Mons uses her connections and wealth to publish a truthful biography of Salvos while she’s absent. In essence, the characters from deeply prejudiced and judgmental groups are showed as actual people who can change their minds and be convinced by reason and evidence, rather than remaining mere vehicles for a trope about bigoted Nazis.

Even the members of the Temples and the Council of Cremont, which is built up as an antagonist in the series, serving the interests of the Spirit Lord and subverting the Arcraem, which uses nefarious means such as summoning Willy to pretend to be a deity in the temples where his job was to shine brightly and look ethereal, so that the people would pray to him as a God, although he as a material being couldn’t hear their prayers and wasn’t what they think he was, until he was so bored he almost went mad; even the Summoners and the Priests of those Temples are portrayed as good people who genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, except for a few at the top of the hierarchy who seem to be outright evil and utterly corrupt. Edithe, for instance, is shown to have been completely brainwashed by the Church where she grew up as a child, and defaults to their formulaic thinking, but she is gradually forced to question and revise those beliefs as actual life happens. For instance, she starts by being a formulaic brainwashed character who attacks Salvos and accuses her of all kinds of nonsense, and eventually grows to understand that Salvos is nothing like her expectations of what a Demon is supposed to be. She also initially annoys Willy with her formulaic approach to him as a Grand Spirit, reminding him of all those people in the Temples who saw him as a mere prop for their choreography. Slowly, as she lets go of that nonsense, he warms to her and they form a working partnership based on mutual respect. He knows she had to stop being a Summoner because she broke her vows, just like he did, but only later does he learn what she actually did – she broke her vow in order to save her Spirit and sacrifice her own life, and was only saved because Salvos arrived in the nick of time. When they met Druma in the Spirit Plane, Willy was shocked to learn that he sees Edithe with such respect that he willingly disobeys the Spirit Lord in order to help her. So, basically, people who are a part of the Temple brainwashing scheme instigated by the Spirit Lord aren’t portrayed as generic elements of some abusive class of villains; there is great complexity, with good people being part of evil schemes, and people adhering to beliefs often quite formally, where their personal choices go against them, and they don’t even bother to make everything consistent and logical, which makes the whole thing seem very realistic. The over-arching pattern that the evil people always rationalize their evil with some great good they are supposedly doing and which never actually happens, while the good people save the world mostly by accident, doing one good deed and making one good decision at a time, is obvious and unavoidable. Also, Salvos beats the prejudice against Demons that troubles her greatly not by whining about it in some theatre of victimhood, but by slowly building a reputation of such magnitude, that the evidence breaks all but the most villainous of the bigoted minds. You just can’t ignore the fact that she leaves the trail of goodness behind her, and that the best and the most virtuous people in the world tend to form her closest friend group. When the truth about her becomes known, the greatest shock is the revelation of how many people actually knew her secret and protected it, and how many members of that group were the supposed sworn enemies of Demons.

Maybe the most shocking aspect of Salvos’ character is her ability to completely ignore one’s past actions and offer forgiveness if a person truly changes. In case of people like Daniel and Edithe, who initially wanted to kill her, and she gradually converted them into friends for life, this is still something one would find reasonable, but she also offers the same option to someone like Belzu, treating him like an individual person with a name, a personal worldview and emotions, and never thinking of him as a thing, the way Humans do, calling him “it”, or Primeval Demon, never bothering to learn his name, let alone his reasons; then it becomes shocking. She has a profound, intimate conversation with him even while he forces her to kill him, and they continue to talk about the differences in their beliefs while he’s dying. It feels incredibly personal, and I don’t think Humans are capable of doing something like that; to kill someone without depersonalising them, trying to see them as a thing so that they could destroy it. There is deep respect there between the two enemies, of the kind that reminds me of the Star Wars cartoons where Obi Wan mortally wounds Maul in a duel, and then holds him in his arms and talks to him while he dies. But it isn’t consistent – for the most part, she just destroys her enemies without giving them much thought. Also, she offers forgiveness and amnesty to the Deathsquad Hunters, to Hartia the sadistic murderous general of Regnorex, and Manos the Executioner. Haec, her brother who was raised in the service of Regnorex, is vindictive and can’t easily let go of his resentment; for instance, he wants Hartia killed for what he’s done, and is annoyed when Salvos forgives him. This is particularly jarring when we know that Haec is personally responsible for all kinds of terrible evils. His full name is Haec the Tormentor, and one can assume that he didn’t get that name by being nice to his fellow Demons. Salvos, on the other hand, is known as Secely’s Sentinel. Haec personally trained the Dukes and Duchesses of the Netherworld, who were sent to the Mortal Realm to spread chaos and destruction – Ira, for instance, committed one of the worst crimes of the whole war, where he sacrificed all the students and staff of the Cedric Academy to summon more Demons. Ira, as well as his colleagues, was stopped by Salvos. Where Salvos left a trail of protection and kindness, Haec left a trail of murder and havoc, and yet, he is unwilling to forgive others who did no worse than himself.

This is a profoundly Christian element of the story – a sinner who is willing to cast stones at other sinners, not seeing a log in his own eye while condemning a speck in another’s eye. Salvos, on the other hand, offers true forgiveness to those who accept her ways and truly change. However, what makes it particularly believable is that she isn’t consistent, and she doesn’t make it into a worldview. It’s mostly the result of how Truth Divination affects her, making her see directly into another person, which is then no longer something on the outside. She talks a lot about always being Salvos and not changing, but she changes and evolves and becomes much more than she initially was, but she also has regressions and relapses into old patterns, which makes the character incredibly relatable and alive.

Also, what makes Salvos feel alive and genuine is that she doesn’t conform to the trope of a good person who is, essentially, an inert victim. She has the innate core of warrior savagery that activates when she fights, and she’s able to make it coexist seamlessly with protective gentleness, often at the same time, without being either lost in her murderous rage and having it consume her, or being softened by her kindness into inability to respond effectively to threats. She’s the counter-example to the Star Wars trope of being lost to the Dark Side once you use it in a fight; to Salvos, this is not a thing. To her, the warrior savagery is merely what it takes if you want to protect those you love from threats. In the same fight, she can protect Hartia with incredible gentleness, and savagely destroy Jofis the Winged Horror in every way imaginable. To her, there is no contradiction. The sword is a shield. To her, there is no dichotomy of means; no “light” and “dark” use of force. Violence gains moral character from the way you use it, and has none of its own.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Well, apparently nobody in the “Salvos” world got the memo, which makes the world so convincing and believable.

The Humans are the most ignorant of all major species, it seems, since they have a wrong understanding of Demons, Elves, Kobolds, and Spirits. They think Demons all follow Regnorex, and that he rules the entirety of the Netherworld, while in fact he rules an area a thousand miles across, making it the size of the Motharis mountain range. They didn’t know that wild demons are a thing until Salvos told them. They don’t know anything about history – nothing about the Worldwalkers, nothing about the state of the Nexeus of old, almost nothing about space travel, nothing about the Dragons, about the Kobold lore, nothing about why the Elves attack them periodically, and nothing about the Corruption. They think the Spirits are some kinds of spiritual entities you pray to, while they are merely material entities similar to the Demons; they think the Spirit Lord is some kind of a God and pray to him, and they know nothing about the Arcraem.

The worst problem is that they would never admit that they don’t know those things. They have their misapprehensions and they hold on to them with incredible force.

The Demons are hardly any better. The Vanguard of Regnorex, the 100 Primeval Demons, know that the mortals wear clothes, but they don’t know why or how, so they wear pants on their heads and so on. They don’t know that there was a Kingdom before Regnorex, in the ancient times, or that the Devil used to be the King of all Netherworld. They don’t know that there are sub-surface layers of the Netherworld, or that there is Corruption, or how it came to be.

The Fairies seem to know more, which is logical since the Fairy Queen was there when Trico deceived them all and broke the world. The Spirit Lord knows all about the Corruption, and has measures to deal with it in the Spirit Plane. Unlike what the Humans think of him, he seems to be a calculated, self-serving bastard, who has been condemned by the Arcraem and unsuccessfully confronted by the Archangel, and I suspect him to be Trico himself, but I don’t have strong evidence for that. In any case, the System identifies the Spirit Lord, also known as Soli, as the arch-villain, and the supreme danger that will result in the destruction of the Nexeus and the death of the Arcraem if not stopped.

In any case, the fact that you get the feeling of deep history, that’s mostly forgotten, and almost everybody has distorted or outright wrong ideas about everything, makes the whole thing look like an actual, old world, with actual civilizations that inhabit it and interact mostly from the position of ignorance. If everybody knew everything and everybody was on the same page of every story, the whole thing would look completely fake and implausible.

So, the Humans think their problem are the invading Elves and Demons. The Kobolds think their problem are the humans who are causing the end of the world with summonings. Salvos thinks the problems are the Corruption and the sacrificial ritual of Regnorex which is likely to break the world completely. The Archangel thinks the problem is the Spirit Lord, because he received the orders from the Arcraem to that effect. So, it seems that only Salvos and the Archangel seem to be on the same page, but neither of them knows the whole truth, or the Archangel would be in the Netherworld dealing with the problem. Also, it seems that the Arcraem is placing Salvos, probably by focusing the timelines so that she can be the right person at the right place at the right time with the right knowledge. The funniest of all is that the Archangel looked completely insane before we got enough information to figure out that he just knows ten times more stuff than anyone else, and that he and the Spirit Lord are on the same page while everybody else is completely ignorant of anything important.

I can’t help but try to imagine how people will react once they are clued in. We can surmise part of it from the level of incredulity of the Human Elites when Salvos explained what she knew about the Corruption, the Kobold lore, the Dragons and the Worldwalkers. Someone who actually knows stuff can look crazy, and that, too, is why the world feels credible. Basically, nobody knows who they are, why they are there, who their enemy is, and who their supposed allies are. In such a situation, their survival is accidental.

One of the most important things in the “Salvos” series is the levelling mechanics. The System, or Arcraem, or whatever it’s locally called, doesn’t actually seem to care about virtue of weak beings. It forces you to either grow stronger or die, because the threats you will be facing are definitely growing stronger, and unless you can match them in strength, you will lose. So, if you’re a good person, you will be forced to develop a very practical kind of goodness, of the kind that forcefully defends good things in your life against violent threats, and definitely not of the fake kind that signals virtue by posting on Twitter about how this or that person is racist, sexist or something-ist, implying how good you are. On the Nexeus, nobody gives a shit. If you’re a good person, face a monster in battle when it wants to raze a town and eat its inhabitants. If you’re too weak, you don’t matter and nobody cares about your imaginary virtue. Get stronger and then you’ll be able to prove your virtue by winning battles against a herd of monsters invading from the nearby forest, or the undead infesting the Plaguelands, or the Centinels from the Bloodied Gulf. The weak are virtueless. They can be only victims. The powerful ones can be either virtuous or villainous, but the weak don’t matter. If you’re weak and pretend to be virtuous, you’re laughed at because you obviously didn’t do anything that mattered, ever. If you’re high levelled, you’re respected, because you obviously did things. Titles are even more extreme – they are a distinction even among those who did important things and levelled. A prestigious Title gives you great esteem within the society. It’s something akin to academic titles, military rank and order of merit. So, when Salvos levels quickly, and cycles through prestigious Titles like Liberator of the Plaguelands and Secely’s Sentinel, that stuff carries lots of weight in the society. Everybody who sees her knows she’s someone who did things of historic importance in mere years. So, when some hereditary Noble around lvl. 40 tries to yell at her, it is understandable why King Lamarr publicly humiliates him and gets him thrown out – he’s basically a nobody, and she’s a Diamond Ranked adventurer and Liberator of the Plaguelands. Her achievements are a form of societal rank. She did things. Her Title was awarded by the world itself. It actually means something. In a meritocratic world, she’s the actual nobility. Someone like King Lamarr, who himself is a meritocrat who won his crown from being a gladiator in the slave pits, knows what it must have taken for a young girl to rise from Gold to Diamond in two years, and to have that Title. There were daily battles to the death and she won. She succeeded where thousands died trying. You don’t get to fuck with her. As I said, there’s no Internet in the Nexeus, where the losers tend to disparage the successful people with no consequences.

So, the levelling mechanics. Where does Salvos currently stand? She is trying to reach her Primordial evolution. The earliest she can get one is lvl. 190, if she has all her Grand Skills maxed out, or she doesn’t have Grand Skills.

Her Grand Skills are:

[Divine Essence of the Angelic Devil Princess] lvl. 2,
[My Flame Shall Burn Until Eternity Ends] lvl. 3 (maxed),
[Claw of Corruption] lvl. 2,
[The World of My Mind] lvl. 5 (maxed),
[Soul Of The Primordial Demon] lvl. 1

As you can see, two of those are maxed, one at 3 points and the other at 5. This means it’s hard to calculate how many points she will have to gather in order max them all out. However, there might be a method to this: “Divine Essence of…” and “My Flame…” are her oldest Grand Skills, which she got as an Archdemon at lvl. 125. “Claw of Corruption” and “The World…” are her more recent ones, which she got as a Primeval Demon, at lvl. 165. There were hints that the Archdemon Grand Skills are inferior in nature to the Primeval and Primordial ones, so let’s assume they max out earlier as they have less potential. We can thus guess that the “Divine Essence…” will also max out at 3, while the “Claw…” will max out at 5. Whether this is actually what the author had in mind, I don’t know, but it feels reasonable and in alignment with the text.

We don’t know what the “Soul of…” does and how it works, except that it manifests two balls of light that only Salvos can see, one of which is red and the other silver, and that Manos recognized it as an immortality skill. I will make a guess: those spheres of light stand for her maxed out Grand Skills. The red one stands for “My Flame…” and the silver one for “The World…”. As she maxes out more Grand Skills, they too will be manifested there. Also, I would expect the “Soul of…” to max out at the number of Grand Skills she has. This is just guesswork, though.

We know she will get another Grand Skill before Sally dies, the “I Am…” Skill she used in her suicidal attack against Matriarch Centinel. She guesses Salvos is above lvl. 190 at that point, and it is my guess that she still hasn’t evolved to a Primordial at that point, which I will explain later. However, if that Grand Skill needs to be maxed as well, and it’s another 5 points, that kind of adds up to being a lot of points. If she doesn’t get enough by the time she needs to evolve to Primordial, she won’t get the option to evolve, and as such will be weaker than all the enemies she is supposed to fight in order to do so. Being forced to fight Primordials before evolving into one is incredibly dangerous, so this is an existential matter for her.

Grand Skill points are awarded at every level integer-divisible by 5. She has two points available to spend. According to my guesswork, she needs 1 for “Divine Essence…”, 3 for “The Claw…”, and 4 for “Soul of…”. This is 8 in total. Then comes the “I Am…”, and we’ll be pessimists and say it needs 4 points to max out, and also forces her to spend another point on the “Soul of…”. This is 13 points in total, and when we deduct the 2 she has, it means she needs 11 more.

She is lvl. 183 in her subspecies and 171 in her Class. This means she would be awarded GS points at 185, 190, 195 and 200, as well as 175, 180, 185, 190, 195 and 200 in her Class. This means that she will be missing one point when she reaches 200 in both subspecies and Class. The last Grand Skill will get her stuck.

Considering what Haec and the Devil told her, Grand Skills are a great detriment to evolving to a Primordial. Regnorex allows only the Demons without Grand Skills to join his Vanguard, supposedly because they can evolve the fastest. Also, since the ordinary Skills evolve to almost Grand Skill level at Primordial, what need is there for the Grand Skills? They just seem to get things harder. Well, I don’t think so. At Primeval evolution, you need to be quite special as a Demon to get a Hellprince/Hellprincess evolution. When you get it, you are more powerful than an ordinary Primeval Demon of your level. Grand Skills and probably Titles contribute greatly to that. Also, it seems that the immortality skills depend greatly on how many Grand Skills you have maxed out. This makes you far more competent and dangerous at Primordial than someone who evolved at lvl. 190 and without Grand Skills, and whom Salvos could probably kill in a few seconds, while being a Primeval at lvl. 174. Also, Salvos has three prestigious Titles, two of them stackable, and her Class is also barely weaker than her subspecies. She’s incredibly overpowered for her nominal level, which is why people underestimate her and die. Sure, you get lots of stat points at your evolution, you get new Skills and your old skills improve. However, compared to what happens when you have multiple maxed out Grand Skills, overpowering Titles and a powerful Class, I would venture a guess that this is next to nothing. Salvos at her Primordial evolution is going to be something rarely seen, if ever, because she’s like one of those battleships bristling with guns. She’s an extraordinary fighter, extraordinary Mage and also an extraordinarily good person for someone of her combat proficiency. However, there will be a snag, even worse than that missing one point. You see, she’s corrupted.

At her lvl. 150 Class advancement, she was offered 3 options, two of which were so badly corrupted she almost died listening to their description, while the third one was corrupted but acceptable. More precisely, the options weren’t corrupted; she was. It stands to reason that the same or worse will repeat when she maxes out her Grand Skills above lvl. 190; she will be offered something that’s too corrupted for her to even look at without dying, and that’s if that missing GS point resolves itself somehow; for instance, if “Soul of…” needs only 5 points and not point for each GS, which might be the case. However, the corruption issue will rear its ugly head at 200 and she will be stuck.

This is the point where I expect her to be stuck, trying to solve a problem that’s too hard, unable to move either forward or back, and having to face her death at the brink of a triumph she failed to reach. She remembers her companions, friends and the highlight reel of her life and prepares to die.

Here’s where we come to Daniel and his [Salvos’s Chosen Hero] Class advancement. We in fact only saw something like this in the “Amelia” series, when Amelia was offered only one option, the [Worldwalker Hero of Vacuos], and it’s not clear why until Grat-ra’zun, the ancient Dragon of that world tells her that it’s a very bad sign; the world System concluded that she’s the only possible salvation for the world. The System can see into the future, it can follow timelines and it find the only timeline that leads to survival, and that’s to recruit Amelia to save it.

So, Daniel’s Class option has multiple meanings. The first is that Salvos chose him as her Hero. That did not necessarily happen in the past; it could have happened in the future, but it is inevitable and the System sees it. The second implication is that the world could be saved only if Daniel accepts that Class. The third implication is that Salvos needs to save the world, and Daniel needs to save Salvos in order for that to happen.

Daniel is currently lvl. 181 in his Class, but he’s a low-levelled Trader in his second class, likely around lvl. 25. Compared to the overwhelming power of Salvos’ Class lvl. 171, he is incredibly weak. He’s not likely to save her by beating some foe she’s too weak to overcome. He can, however, give her a 10% stat boost with his “Will of the Hero” Skill. While this is important, I think the emotional part of him being there for her while she’s essentially stranded in a hellhole, surrounded by people who care only for what she can do for them, might be much more important. Also, when he accepts that Class, I would expect him to get some Skill that can tell him when Salvos is in mortal danger. Whether he’ll also get a Skill that can teleport him to her location, or will he use that feather the Watcher showed him, of one-time teleportation to the location of whatever you’re thinking of at the moment, remains to be seen. In any case, I expect her to be in serious trouble, and I expect Daniel to come to the rescue, finally being the Hero where it actually matters. And then, I expect the sync with Sally to begin.

Sally made a big contribution to killing Matriarch Centinel, lvl. 238. That’s going to create a deluge of experience after Edithe/Archangel kills her. Sally also represents the only uncorrupted aspect of Salvos, that was stranded in the Mortal Realm without any connection while Salvos was corrupted in the second layer of the Netherworld, fighting those Corrupted Hellspaces. Sally also developed not only mana system, but also a soul of her own, and in the end sacrificed herself willingly to save others. All of that is going to sync with Salvos. I don’t actually know what to expect, but I think she’ll get her corruption fixed and her status screen will reset, finally offering her the option to evolve. This will be not only Primordial Demon of the Hellqueen status, but also the next evolution of her Lesser God species – Greater or True God, depending on what Melas has planned. In any case, since almost everybody ever evolves to Lesser God at 200, and that’s the last evolution, they simply have no options for the next step. But if one evolves to Lesser God at 150, there’s a next evolutionary option at 200. Also, since she will perform something noble and self-sacrificial with both her souls, something going to happen there and the System is going to give her an option that will save the world, which will make Daniel’s class make sense.

However, based on how Melas wrote other series, I don’t think Nexeus will be saved. I think Salvos will be able to save the people in The World of Her Mind which will become a proper world, independent of the Nexeus and able to traverse the Void while Salvos retains all her magical abilities. I think she’ll pack everybody who wants to go, and they will go to Earth-1, Daniel’s home, since she promised to find him a way there.

Whether the series continues from that point onwards, I can’t tell, but I think everything points to Daniel and Salvos being in an actual relationship at that point.

I can’t say what happens to Samuel and Belphegor. It would be a shame for them to die, but I also don’t see them merely tagging along with Salvos. It’s a complete blind spot in my ability to guess. Also, she has some plan to drop the Beast onto Regnorex from a rift, counting on it to destroy everything and disrupt the ritual. I don’t see that succeeding, but she might use Truth Divination on the Beast and befriend it, which might result in all sorts of hilarious outcomes, when the Beast shapeshifts into a scary-looking humanoid and accompanies her.

In any case, this is where I exhaust my ability to make educated guesses and I’d have to start inventing stuff outright, but I would rather wait for Melas to do his own thing and hopefully do something positively surprising.