stress concentration is tightly linked to the disorder in the initial, undeformed, system. How crack nucleation and propagation are influenced by both initial disorder and stress heterogeneity during deformation is not trivial. We have already seen that in the RSN model not all sacrificial bonds that break are part of the largest crack (Fig. \[fig:StressStrain\]). Thus, it seems that stress can be delocalized away from the crack tip of the largest crack throughout the system via diffuse damage. In this section, we quantify the evolution of (micro)cracks in the sacrificial network, focusing on diffuse damage and its coupling with stress delocalization.

In Fig. \[fig:Diffuse\](a), we plot the diffuse damage, quantified by the fraction of broken sacrificial bonds (with respect to the total number of initial sacrificial bonds) that are not part of the largest crack $\phi_{diff}$ as a function of strain $\epsilon$ for three representative systems below, around and above the BDT (see Supplemental Material [@supp]). In the brittle case ($\Delta\tilde{\alpha}=-2.9$), $\phi_{diff}$ barely increases and fracture occurs at smaller strain. Closer to the BDT ($\Delta\tilde{\alpha}=-0.7$), the diffuse damage significantly increases, reaches a maximum, and just before final failure slightly decreases. This decrease in the curve indicates that microcracks merge into 