Watts finally told them everything.

  It wasn’t the victory they had hoped for. It wasn’t the revelation that shattered the Cycle for good. But it was a truth they couldn’t ignore.

  “The Cycle feeds on conflict,” Watts said, his voice hollow, devoid of its usual malice. “The more we fight, the stronger it gets. Every battle, every death, every moment of suffering—it all feeds it. The Cycle grows, spreads, *tightens* its grip.” He paused, his eyes dull but still sharp with understanding. “The only way to stop it is to break the pattern.”

  Lester and Franklin exchanged a glance. They had hoped for a simpler answer, a weapon, a way to destroy the Cycle with brute force. But this? This was different. This was about giving up the one thing that had defined their existence—the fight.

  They made the hardest choice yet.

  They refused to fight.

  No weapons. No strategies. No ambushes. No more ink dragons or shadow shields. Just *waiting* in the eye of the storm, standing still in a world thatdemanded chaos.

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  When Watts attacked, they didn’t retaliate.

  The air buzzed with energy, with force, with violence. But Lester and Franklin remained unmoved. Their bodies tensed, but they didn’t strike back. The world seemed to hold its breath, watching them, waiting.

  Watts, sensing the absence of resistance, faltered. His hands trembled, energy crackling uselessly around him. He surged forward again, desperate to break them, to make them *fight.*

  But they stood firm.

  The Cycle struggled to maintain itself.

  Time wavered.

  Reality *hiccupped.*

  The air flickered, as if it couldn’t decide which version of itself it was supposed to be. Echoes of every past battle—the screams, the explosions, the flashes of ink and shadow—flickered across the world like ghosts. Past moments of death, of betrayal, of victory, bled into the present. Time itself bent and warped around them.

  For a brief, terrifying moment, Lester thought they were failing. The Cycle was too strong, too ingrained. But then—

  A fracture.

  A *crack* in reality.

  It wasn’t much. Just a tiny break in the fabric of everything, a fleeting moment when the world stuttered and paused.

  But it was enough.

  The Cycle wavered, a glitch too large to ignore. The echo of their refusal to fight reverberated across every timeline. It was like a wound in the system, a flaw in the machine.

  Lester and Franklin stood, unshaken. And the world, for the first time in countless resets, *paused.*