Interesting. I’m aware of a glitch that won’t trigger the fight if you spam the buttons during the dialogue (which I’m in the process of fixing), but to get around that, all you have to do is just talk to him again and you’re good to go.
…But I’ve never heard of the dialogue just failing to trigger altogether! That’s a new one. I’ll dig into it and see what I can find.
in the interest of finishing the game, what happens if you kill yourself on the spikes?