The Mass-to-Light Freedom, Priced: The One-Scale Kill Survives the Stellar Population

The algebraic one-scale class — every law of the form g_obs = g_bar·ν(g_bar/g†) with one frozen scale — fails the joint SPARC closure of Papers 82 and 83 in a specific way: the frozen normalization pays on both tables on both skies, and the corrected slope misses, with a regime structure. A standing objection to that kill is that its baryonic table is built at one fixed stellar mass-to-light ratio, Υ_disk = 0.5 and Υ_bul = 0.7, and a different population choice might close what the standard choice leaves open. This paper prices that objection. The Υ freedom is granted in full: a fifteen-point grid, Υ_disk from 0.30 to 1.00 and Υ_bul from 0.35 to 1.30, the exact published range, run over all nine interpolation forms of the completed form space — 135 grid cells, every cell a complete re-test of the registered joint closure, Locks 0, 1 and 2, frozen before any cell ran. No cell closes. Over the grid, 61 cells die on Lock 1, the baryonic-table lock, and 71 die on the Lock 2 intercept while passing its slope term — a class the standard-Υ point never exhibits. Exactly two cells pass all three locks on the full galaxy set, both revenue-negative cancellations: frozen-line means of −0.157 and −0.160 dex against an identity that predicts zero, admitted by the ≤ 0.20 dex band only, and both fail the registered replication — neither survives a single half of the sample, dying on the high-V_f wall, where the frozen-line mean sits at −0.309 to −0.323 dex and the corrected slopes hold at the same 3.24 to 3.27 the standard point produces. The Υ freedom moves the failure around inside the tables. It does not close them. The mass-to-light freedom does not rescue the algebraic one-scale class. The kill of Papers 82 and 83 survives the stellar population.