arXiv:2610.32019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cybersickness remains a major barrier to comfortable, accessible virtual reality (VR). Arising from mismatches between visual and vestibular signals, it places sustained demands on gaze stabilization and visual processing. Because gaze is the mechanism through which users actively sample the virtual environment, cybersickness-induced disruptions may alter both what users perceive and how discomfort itself emerges. Yet, how eye-movement behavior evolves alongside discomfort during prolonged VR exposure remains poorly understood. We present a behavioral analysis of eye-tracking data from 19 participants navigating a realistic virtual environment over a 20-minute session, with discomfort rated repeatedly throughout the experiment. Linear mixed-effects models examined gaze constructs spanning fixation stability, visual exploration, and gaze allocation as functions of discomfort, exposure duration, and their interaction. Our results show that fixation stability degraded progressively with increasing discomfort, with the effect strengthening over time. Visual exploration showed no marginal discomfort effect but exhibited significant discomfort-by-time interactions, indicating that saccadic behavior adapts dynamically rather than responding uniformly to discomfort. Gaze allocation was not associated with discomfort but shifted systematically with time. These findings show that cybersickness does not uniformly disrupt gaze. Instead, different aspects of eye-movement behavior respond differently and change in ways that only become visible when discomfort is tracked repeatedly over time. Understanding how gaze evolves during cybersickness progression provides the behavioral grounding needed to better interpret how discomfort shapes the user's visual experience of immersive environments and to design more sensitive detection approaches.