The grand, cosmic duel between Ryan and the Harvester was a beautiful, terrifying, and very evenly matched fight. It was a perfect stalemate.

The Harvester, with its immense, galaxy-draining power, would try to trap Ryan in a single, perfect, and very boring fate. It would attack with a wave of pure, beautiful, and utterly final Order.

Ryan, with his stubborn, chaotic, and very human will, would counter by shattering that perfect fate with an explosion of a million, messy, and wonderful possibilities. He would fight back with a wave of pure, unpredictable, and glorious Life.

Order versus Life. Perfection versus Chaos. It was a battle of two, equal, and opposite forces, and neither side could gain an advantage. They were two impossibly strong wrestlers, locked in a struggle, and neither one could push the other back.

And then, something changed.

The Harvester gathered its power for another, massive attack. It was going to be its ultimate expression of the Law of Purpose, a final, perfect, and inescapable wave of pure, orderly fate.

But as the wave of brilliant, blue-white energy formed, it flickered. For just a single, tiny, almost unnoticeable moment, a flicker of a different color, a spark of golden-green, appeared in the heart of the perfect, blue-white light.

The attack, when it came, was still incredibly powerful. But it was no longer perfect. It had a flaw. A tiny, almost insignificant wobble in its perfect, logical structure.

Ryan, who was braced for another, perfect, soul-crushing assault, felt the flaw instantly. It was like a single, wrong note in a perfect, beautiful, and very loud song. And that single, wrong note gave him an opening.

He didn't just block the attack. He sidestepped it, weaving his own, chaotic energy around the flaw, and he pushed back, harder than ever before.

For the first time in the duel, the Harvester was pushed back. It stumbled, its perfect, symmetrical form flickering with a moment of pure, logical confusion.

This was not supposed to happen. Its power was supposed to be perfect.

It tried again. Another attack. And again, there was a flaw. A tiny, messy, and very human-like imperfection in its perfect, machine-like power.

Ryan, sensing the shift, a new, wild hope surging through him, pressed his advantage. He was no longer just defending. He was attacking, his own, chaotic, life-filled energy now crashing against the Harvester's faltering defenses.

The Harvester, a being that had been born into a world of perfect, optimized logic, a being that had only ever known the clean, simple certainty of success, could not understand what was happening. It had never experienced failure before. It had never had to deal with a messy, imperfect variable.

The tiny, almost insignificant flaws in its power were not just weakening its attacks. They were creating tiny, almost insignificant cracks in its own, perfect, and very fanatical, faith.

It was beginning to doubt. And for a being of pure, absolute certainty, doubt was a poison.

Aboard The Argo, Emma, whose mind was a thing of brilliant, strategic patterns, saw the shift in the battle. She was not watching a chaotic brawl. She was watching a beautiful, cosmic chess game. And the Harvester had just made a mistake.

"He's winning," she breathed, her voice a quiet, hopeful whisper on the silent bridge.

The Matriarchs, who had all been standing in a state of tense, silent dread, dared to hope. They could all feel the slow, life-draining pull of the Harvest begin to lessen, just a tiny bit. Ryan's fight was having a real, tangible effect.

Zara, however, was not watching the fight itself. She was a scientist. She was watching the numbers. Her sensors were still locked onto the energy signature of the Gardener's systems, the vast, cosmic power grid that was fueling the Harvester.

And she saw it. A tiny, but undeniable, anomaly.

She saw the clean, perfect, and efficient flow of energy that was going to the Harvester. And then she saw a second, much smaller, and very chaotic, energy signature that seemed to be… fighting it. It was a tiny, rebellious flicker of chaos inside the Gardener's own, perfect, logical machine. It was a bug in the system.

"My God," she whispered, her voice full of a pure, scientific, and slightly terrified awe. She looked up from her console, her eyes wide with a dawning, impossible understanding.

"It's the Gardener," she said. "The Gardener is fighting itself."

The Harvester, in its growing, logical panic, did not understand the source of its problems. It just knew that its power, which should have been absolute, was failing. Its perfect connection to its god was being… interfered with.

And in a moment of pure, desperate, and fanatical rage, it made a fatal mistake.

It decided that the problem must be on its end. It decided that it needed more power.

It overrode the Gardener's subtle, quiet interference. It reached out with its own, powerful will and it opened a direct, unfiltered, and very, very wide conduit to the universal harvest itself. It was no longer just sipping power through the Gardener's controlled, regulated straw. It had just ripped the top off the universe's biggest and most powerful energy drink and was trying to chug the whole thing at once.

Its power skyrocketed.

The Harvester's form, which had been a brilliant, blue-white light, now exploded with an almost blinding, raw power. The very space around it seemed to groan under the sheer, unimaginable weight of the energy it was now channeling. Its power level was now at a height that Ryan could not possibly hope to match.

But it had made a terrible trade.

It had gained a universe of power. But it had lost all control.

It was now a dangerously, and very beautifully, unstable vessel, filled with a raw, cosmic power that its own, perfect, and now very fragile, mind could no longer control. It was a living, breathing, and very, very angry nuclear bomb, and the countdown to its own, self-inflicted detonation had just begun.