And then every other mouse in The Pantry Purlieu stopped moving at the same time.

They hadn’t prevented anything.

Wobble didn’t flatten. Wobble ruptured . Then the game froze for exactly one second—long enough for Kaelen to see the rupture wasn’t a graphical glitch. It was anatomical. Accurate. The kind of thing you’d only know if you’d seen a small mammal fail under pressure.

“We’re the crush.”

No speech bubble. No UI. Just a text crawl across Kaelen’s taskbar, outside the game window.