Page 3178

A real fight. Yes. Something proper and orderly. Yes. Intelligently conceived and thought-through. Yes. As Jercash would want, surely. Yes.

Yes...

No.

The Chaos in him burned. Rebelled.

Not the beings born of Chaos. Those had been quieted by Darksteel’s aura.

No. The Chaos within him. His half of the mind. The Chaos that had always been there, since his earliest days. Silent and furious. At the world. At, perhaps, even existence itself.

That part of him still had a say in things. As much as he wanted to be rational, to break the mold set by his many obnoxious contemporaries in Abolish, Banda Toro still had to face up to his own nature. The nameless judge within himself.

The divine font of the Void, some called it.

Wouldn’t it be a shame to flee now? Before even getting so much as a look at this Darksteel? Wouldn’t doing that actually empower Darksteel more, in some ways? His reputation? Wouldn’t it be contributing to his growing mystique as that of yet another bogeyman to Abolish?

Surely, they didn’t need another one of those.

That’s right. There were reasons to stay and fight. Fairly intelligent and rational ones, even. Yes. That was how the Chaos functioned. It might have been fueled by emotion primarily, but emotion was highly motivating to all sorts of ends, wasn’t it? Rationalization could certainly be one of those ends. Motivated thinking was still thinking.

Heh.

The Raptor of Kortan was a mess. A ferocious, distorted mess. But that, of course, came with the territory when accepting Chaos so literally into one's flesh. Lozaro had warned them all of this.

"Chaos takes no sides," he'd said. "Or rather, you might say, it takes all sides. It will work both for and against you, if you let it. It will twist your mind. Put you at war with yourself--even whilst it empowers you against your foes with abilities that even I am only beginning to understand. That is why you must will it into submission, first."

He was losing control here. That was what all these conflicting thoughts meant, Banda suddenly realized. It was not unlike pan-rozum in that way. He had to maintain focus. Control.

He had to eradicate indecision.

Yes.

That was a poison in this form.

Nothing for it, then. He could delay no longer. To fight or to flee? Which would it be?

He made his choice.