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This was good. And also not.

Hector liked knowing that these guys weren'timpervious to fear-based tactics, but at the same time, it seemed like Banda Toro was going to make things difficult.

Hector could scare the hell out of them all day long, but if Banda was there to call his bluff every time, then what difference would it make? Eventually, the rest of them would catch on.

Unless Hector made good on some of this fear.

And perhaps he could do that.

They still didn't know that he could sense them. They didn't even realize that he was up here aboveground. And as Pauline had mentioned, they were worried about a "reactive dust beacon."

To Hector's mind, that could only be something like what he had seen from Leo in the Undercrust. A material that had been imbued with a reaction state. These Abolishers were scared that they had triggered some sort of reaction-state-based alarm system.

Obviously, he didn't know how to use reaction states, as they were an incredibly advanced materialization technique, but these intruders didn't know that. So what if he took that a step further, then?

Couldn't he create some pretty wild shit and disguise it as being part of a reaction state?

He could use the enemy's own battlefield expertise against them.

All those thoughts raced back and forth across multiple processes in his head, and Hector arrived quite quickly at the conclusion that, yeah, he liked that idea. It certainly sounded better than waiting around for them to make the next move.

He'd never had cause to create anything like an iron puppet before. From a purely practical standpoint, it just never made much sense. Anything that the puppet would do, he'd have to think quite hard about in order to accomplish via the rules of materialization in order to give the appearance that it was actually moving autonomously. In normal combat, it was far more efficient to simply launch attacks himself.

This was clearly not normal combat, however.