There's a lot wrong with that reply -- it mostly just shifts the goalposts without answering the central objections raised in the comment. Much of the reply re

There's a lot wrong with that reply -- it mostly just shifts the goalposts without answering the central objections raised in the comment. Much of the reply revolves around whether the mixed invariant G=E⋅B appears at leading or higher order in the QED Schwinger result. But the comment's critique used the constant-field Schwinger problem only as a check that the authors' master formula fails against a case with an exact answer; the real complaint is that the same failure occurs for curved-spacetime examples where the exact result is known to vanish. Debating G is fine, but you can't ignore the gravitational case either. The reply repeatedly says the comment is "outside the realm of applicability" of the formula -- as though that were the comment's fault! But if the formula cannot survive the very checks the authors themselves hold up (Schwinger with B≠0, Ricci-flat space), the burden is on the authors to (severely) restrict their own claims, not on critics to ignore the failure modes.