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Even his own aura was not harmless. It wanted to respond to the heat and fury that he sensed from Banda. It wanted to influence his thoughts, to urge him into a direct fight with the Raptor of Kortan as a challenger to be met.

Which was absurd. They were not equals. Not in the least.

But there was something so moving in it. So motivating. And convincing, too.

Because if he ran, if he stalled, if he failed to meet Banda’s challenge head on, then Banda would know.

Everything would be laid bare. The aura would give it away. How true and feeble the deception had been all this time. And then Banda would really attack Warrenhold. That wicked red smoke would go down into the Entry Tower and search all throughout the fortress, learning its shape and its secrets, devouring any of the defenseless residents that it could find. Sure, they should've all been gathered in the Tower of Night by now, and yeah, maybe its nightrock walls would be able to offer some protection against such an infiltration, but still.

That was no guarantee. Not at all. That was a hope and a prayer, at best.

In many ways, this flash of a feeling was impossible to articulate. The auras made it so.

Instead, Hector merely felt that he needed to be more than even he himself thought he could be, right now. He needed to be the thing that Banda’s aura was searching for. Testing for.

He needed to be Darksteel.

There was no avoiding it. Banda Toro would know if he tried. And then, not long after, Bloodeye would know. So even if Banda left them alone, the next assault would come very swiftly--and be much, much worse than this.

At best, it would be a true siege. At worst, a total slaughter.

Yes. Hector felt certain of these things. Beyond certain, even. As if he had lived through such experiences before.

And so, to everyone else, it probably made little sense, what he was about to do. There was no opportunity to explain his thought process to them. Hell, even if there had been, he probably wouldn't have been able to. So he didn't try. He just turned back to the others behind him, to Roman Fullister and Joana Cortes.

Page 3179 -- CCLXXI.

Chapter Two Hundred Seventy-One: ‘Beware the Doormen...’
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Hector sensed a change immediately. He couldn’t tell why or how. It wasn’t his eyes that alerted him. Nor the Scarf. By all accounts, Banda was just sitting up there in the air, flapping his smoky wings and biding his time.

But there was something very off. Hector could just feel it in his mind and in his gut. Banda was suddenly different, somehow. Not in any visible way.

Was it aura? He might’ve asked Pauline if there’d been time for it.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t.

Up to now, Hector had been hoping against hope that the guy would just fucking leave already. It hadn’t looked likely at first, but with the way that Banda had been edging farther and farther away from Warrenhold, Hector had slowly been starting to believe that all these silly tricks and mind games might’ve actually been working on this monster. Slowly but surely, perhaps.

This new feeling changed all that. And when the Raptor of Kortan loosed such a thunderous, inhuman cry that the iron walls of the decoy castle shuddered, Hector knew for certain that he was right.

This fight was not yet done.

Banda surged back downward, an arrow-like cloud of smoke and flesh, coming straight toward him this time.

Hector still hadn’t revealed himself, but that probably didn’t matter at this point, did it? Banda could sense him, couldn’t he? There was something in the Raptor’s disposition or aura that made that so obvious.

Banda was coming for him. The intent might as well have been a shimmering blade for how apparent it was.

Alright.

The very thing that Hector had been trying to avoid this whole time was now happening. He couldn’t stop it, anymore.

So he had to face it. There was no choice.

A direct fight with an enemy that he was not at all a match for. An enemy that he stood no chance against, quite frankly.

There were other ideas in the back of his mind. Of course there were. He could try to buy time. Maybe Abbas would show up and save him. Word should have gotten to the Sunsmith by now, surely. It wasn’t impossible.

Hector wasn’t rejecting that plan totally. It sounded pretty great, honestly.

But there was something else at play, too. These auras, he supposed it was. His and Banda’s. They were throwing a wrench into everything. He didn’t understand them, but he knew they were affecting him. Threatening him. Trying to consume him.

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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.