Hmm... I have some hopes for this faintly red color stuff. I've honestly felt like the horn color stuff is a bit of a cop-out as it gives our heroes low level omnipotence to always know who is good or who is bad (for their purposes at least). I hope that now that we're having things more established and an actual community, plus smarter people and actual diplomatic ties to various people with diplomatic training that there's going to be a higher reliance on being able to figure people out and navigating communication instead of being able to immediately know if they're friend or foe before you even say hello. Chapter is also pretty good otherwise, the reasoning of "It's just 2 people, do you really expect me to send 1,000 soldiers against them?" was very much appreciated as it does help give some good justification for helping to keep things to an actually reasonable number. Like 50 elites(?) vs 12 of our people is a rather big difference but they've well established that Dias is basically a combat god who's proven himself during war, so it's not as unreasonable as I thought we'd be facing, and using his reputation and past deeds to have the 200 mercenaries turn things down also fits in, it makes sense that the spoiled princess would bring them, and that they'd back out, repaying the up front money they were given, and serves to give us more justification for why the amount of enemies that Dias and co. actually fought was a number that isn't too much of a stretch, but also doesn't make it seem like the Princess completely underestimated Dias as well.
Just very good writing as usual in this chapter I think, on top of hope that the story is going to have the horn color stuff be less of a solution to the important problems that will be rising as it has been up to this point.