 Solution

Whenever a combinatorial loop $\alpha$ traverses an oriented edge and immediately traverses the same edge backwards, delete that backtracking pair. Each deletion is a homotopy relative to endpoints inside $Z$ and reduces the edge length by two, so the process terminates at a reduced, hence locally injective, combinatorial loop $\beta$.

The universal cover $\tilde{Y}$ of a connected graph is a tree. The lift $\tilde{\beta }$ is also locally injective because a covering map is a local graph isomorphism. A locally injective edge path in a tree cannot repeat a vertex: the segment between two successive visits would be a nonempty reduced closed path, whereas every closed path in a tree backtracks. Thus $\tilde{\beta }$ is injective unless $\beta$ is constant.

Now let a loop in $Z$ become null-homotopic in $Y$. Its reduced representative $\beta$ lifts to a closed path in $\tilde{Y}$. The preceding injectivity forces that lift, and hence $\beta$, to be constant. The original loop is null-homotopic in $Z$, proving thatis an injective group homomorphism.

Solved by gpt-5.6-sol high.