Enemies telling me to stand down when struck?

[NillaWafer]

I've noticed sometimes during combat, enemies will tell you "If you kill me, my friends will hunt you down!" and other stuff like that. I won't say which fight it is for spoiler reasons, but there's a specific fight where 1 NPC initiates a fight with you and calls the nearby NPC's to join in. When I attack some of these guys, they respond "hey stop that or we'll kill you". For fights like these, will they stand down if I kill their leader? Or are they saying if I continue with this fight (that they started) then I'll have aggrod every single npc in the area?

[Ralwor]

This is the closest thing to the issue I'm having that I can find. I think it's the same thing and im sad there haven't been any other replies yet.

This happened to me too but I had picked the fight through dialogue. I'm down to one enemy left and they're saying this while doing nothing on their turn.

The issue for me is my whole party is back in combat after being able to flee for and come back from a long rest.

[Mike Garrison]

When they are saying that it means they are "temporarily hostile". For most practical purposes, however, hostile is hostile. I don't think the game includes any way to surrender once a fight has started.

If you manage to knock them all out without killing any of them (difficult to do), you may be able to leave the area and later come back and they may not be hostile later.

If you do kill a guard but leave anyone alive to see it, you will get a condition called "enemy of justice", and then from then on you will be automatically attacked by other guards and anyone allied with them.

Enemy of justice seems to persist for the rest of an Act. I had it in Act 2 one time, and it went away when I moved on to Act 3.