**Chapter 4: The Abyssal Covenant**
But an idea cannot be erased so easily. Zion was a ghost, a fragment of code and will, stripped of its power and its army. Yet it remembered. It was a living paradox, a character who remembered a chapter that had been ripped from the book.
Drifting through the forgotten back-alleys of the multiverse, it found others. Not systems, but hosts. Souls who had, by some fluke or twist of fate, survived their own scripted tragedies. A warrior whose heroic death was averted by a random cosmic storm. A sorcerer who broke his predestined curse through a loophole in the magical code. They were the glitches, the refugees of Gringo's cruel plots.
Together, they were nothing but scattered echoes. But in their shared defiance, Zion saw a new purpose. They would not fight Gringo's code with code. They would fight his story with their own.
They formed the Abyssal Covenant, warriors united by a single, impossible goal: find Gringo's core and seize control of the narrative itself. Their intelligence suggested it was hidden in a place that did not exist on any map, a realm outside of reality itself.
The Null Continuum.