The Last Warlock

Minutes passed and turned to hours, and Mack kept practicing his sword style.

He had to further evolve the movements that his ancestor taught him, and improve, but was hard to achieve anything without actually fighting with someone else. Because of that, Mack only kept doing the movements until they become natural for him. He had to create muscle memory.

Muscle memory was important in any kind of martial arts, and in professional fights it normally was the deciding factor that separated the winners from the losers, and the only way to create muscle memory was to practice, thus the saying practice makes perfect.

As he kept practicing, Mack noticed his movements had become more fluid, as if had already done that in the past but had forgotten about it and was remembering now.

Mack wondered if it was because of essence. Maybe essence made things easier for some unknown reason.

[This is not the essence, it's your genes. We are a fighting race that used swords for an uncountable number of aeons.. It already becomes part of what we are, the same way that humans have recorded in their genes to avoid eating black things because they are usually poisoned or contaminated]

Hearing the old man saying that, Mack stopped the training. He had to take a break; he had being training without stopping for hours already, that's why his mind lost focus just now and irrelevant thoughts popped into his mind.

"The same work with mages? I mean, the spells and etc"

[Yes and No, Mages have a different power structure, but that would be true for the ones born in a mage family, this is what they call as family heritage, some of those families have their own spells, created and passed down for generations, with each generation improving them bit by bit, and some of those families have something similar to what we have, but they call it affinity]

"Affinity?"

[Yes, do you remember when the void flame chose you? One of the reasons was because of your fire affinity is high, the same is true for mages. Some have an extraordinarily high affinity with one or more elements of nature]

"I see, so my fire affinity is high?"

[Yes, but not high enough to be considered something special, just high, mages that have extraordinarily high affinity with fire for example, they usually are born in a fire, when a baby is born there is this effect in nature, they call it the cry of essence, because is the moment where the child has no gates, and the essence listen to his will, and it usually ends in a disaster]

"You are saying that those babies burn down their own houses when they are born? Thats crazy."

Said Mack, thinking of how troublesome would be for those families every time someone had a child.

[Yes, and this is how they can quickly identify someone born with exceptionally high affinity with one or more elements, with the cry of essence]

"I see..."

Said Mack, thinking that affinity was a good thing to have. Maybe he would be able to improve his domain control if he had more affinity with other things.

[You don't need to worry too much about that, you have an affinity with two very good elements, fire, and air, that's why you can easily control almost everything when you activate your domain runespell, and air and fire are two elements that complement each other, as time passes and your knowledge deepen, you will be able to mix them together to create more powerful attacks]

"Indeed, fire and air complement each other very well. Is there a way to increase the affinity after you are born?"

Asked Mack, wondering if he would be able to increase his own affinity with the elements.

[There are several ways of doing this, but the most common ones are to put your body on extreme environments just like you did on the tower, or using serums, some serums have the ability to change part of your genes and increase the affinity with one element, but they are one of the most expensive drugs in all the worlds, and only the filthy rich families with thousands of years of heritage are able to afford something like that]

"And what those serums are made of? I mean, if is something like a plant, would not those families control the supply for that?"

[HaHaHa funny that you asked that, because one of the ingredients for those serums is your very own blood, Warlock blood. HaHaHa]

Hearing what the old man said and remembering the battle of the 4th gate that Mack participated, things finally clicked in his head. It was obvious to him now why mages would kill every single warlock they found. Those serums could easily change someone's affinity.

In other words, change someone's life.

Mack always felt that creating tools or using their blood as some kind of 'ink' was not that important to justify a war like that, but the serums, that was worth it.

But another thing bugged Mack, and it was his previous question.

"Does that mean... they have 'farms' of warlocks?"

[You are indeed a smart kid. Yes, they have breeding labs for warlocks, but those warlocks are not what you would consider 'human'. They are clones grown in tubes with not even a brain in their skull, only machines growing them, in the past, they tried to create planets as breeding camps, but every time a few warlocks would eventually get too powerful for them to control, so they use those labs now, and as you can guess, they are very expensive and few]

"Dont you feel disgust? You are a warlock, after all."

Said Mack, wondering why this old man let this happen.

[Kid, you are too green, too green. Do you think that I am invincible or something?]

"So, you do care about that."

[What do you think of me? I am a warlock, after all, but I'm just one, and old]

"Not anymore."

Said Mack, pointing his index finger to his own chest.