I picked all the conversational options, other than Do Nothing; eventually I ran them all out and was left with Fight.
And no way am I deliberately losing after having had to slog through three fights. If I have another round where everyone but the Champ dies and Taldas is still at full, I'll Sense before I'm killed, but with my luck it'll probably fail, just as my Flee attempts (not versus bosses obviously) almost always fail. (And it's bad game design to treat "lose the game to gain knowledge, then restart and use that knowledge" as a deliberate tactic. That sort of thing might be impossible to avoid for logistical reasons, but it's certainly inappropriate to encourage it; it'd be like allowing football players to freeze the enemy team and walk the ball across the goal line, because Madden NFL 64 has a glitch where the AI hangs, and you wanted to intentionally reproduce that in other versions of football.)