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He could feel Grigozo's cowardice creeping to the fore, seeping into his reasoning.

Was he actually considering abandoning the fight, right now? Disbanding pan-rozum and letting the reaper flee underground?

No. Absurd.

Darksteel had surprised him, sure, but this fight was far from lost. And besides, splitting up now was not traditionally considered a wise strategic move. There were too many ways for high threat warriors to chase an escaping reaper down and kill or capture them.

In fact, according to Bloodeye, that was precisely how Darksteel had managed to kill the Man of Crows.

Banda wasn't going to let Grigozo make the same mistake.

None of these thoughts were fully articulated in Banda's mind. They were flashing sensations, at best. Instinctual feelings. He didn't have the luxury of time to mull things over as much as he wanted. Confused as he was, he still knew that he had to be decisive and quick in his thinking here.

Especially when he felt the ground and rubble all around him begin to tremble.

Darksteel wasn't going to just let him sit down here and regenerate, it seemed.

The gaseous form was the only solution to Banda's mind. It allowed him to squeeze through the gaps in the rock and escape out into multiple directions at once.

He had to be careful here, though. In this depleted state, he didn't have much smoke to pull from, and he ran the risk of spreading himself too thin--quite literally.

That was the biggest danger when it came to learning and maintaining gas forms with pan-rozum. The gas had to be rigidly controlled with one's mind. It was already trying to spread itself apart and disperse by its own physical properties. If you let the gas thin out too much, then the pan-rozum merge would collapse and exhaust both the reaper and servant simultaneously.

Thankfully, he could add more smoke to himself through the materialization component of pan-rozum, but that also put more strain on the form--and was only a bandage on the problem, besides. The materialized smoke wasn't truly part of him, after all. Regeneration was still preferable.

But that was also an issue. In the gaseous form, regeneration was halted. He needed to get out of it as soon as possible in order to let the healing continue. Which was a risk, too, of course.

He made it aboveground with multiple different whiffs of red smoke. He rushed to reconvene them but sensed another attack coming and had to disperse again.