The Last Warlock

After a few hours of practicing and finally noticing that night had arrived, Mack stopped doing his exercises, turned the lights on, and grabbed a bottle of water from the table by his side.

Once he stopped drinking the water, the fatigue hit him. 'I should take a break', and sat on a simple mat in the center of the room.

Physically tired and bored, Mack grabbed his backpack, and from its insides he took a book that had a skull and two daggers on the cover. It was the assassination skill book he received from the old man back on Earth. He already knew the contents of the book by head, but in his opinion was always good to study it again from time to time, be it out of boredom, or just to 'review' the content of the book and refresh his memory.

Flipping the pages, Mack read the topics on the book, 'How to walk', 'How to run', 'How to Escape', etc etc, the book followed a very structural and methodical approach to assassination that even the best teachers on earth would not find fault on how the book was written, it started by teaching 'how to survive', and only then moved to 'how to kill' by using poison or venom, then it taught how to assassinate using 'clean ways' that no one would suspect like forged accidents etc, and only at the final of the book it taught how to kill by fighting.

'I probably should learn how to read the common language,' thought Mack, reading the translated version that Harlack created for him.

Flipping the pages, Mack stopped at a very odd page that always grabbed his attention, because that page had a spell that Mack always wanted to transform it in a rune circuit. The spell was called 'Shadow Steps', it didn't provide any speed nor made the user faster in any way nor it made people become shadows or even walk on shadows as the name suggested.

'But is very useful for me' Thought Mack, because what the spell did was to create a dissonance effect in the essence, in a practical way, this caused an illusion effect, once someone used this spell and started running, from time to time his figure would disappear and appear as if the user became blurry.

The true way they achieved this was by keeping an 'image' made of essence from the user and when he moved, the dissonance effect resulted from the 'copy' would make him as if he was 'invisible' for a brief moment, in the eyes of someone looking,

It was a trick made using a human brain flaw, because the brain tends to believe that if something is there, it will correct 'the image' to what it knows, it's basically a glitch in the brain, and with the combination of the dissonance effect it makes the user of the spell look like he is just blurred shadows moving, leaving a series of after images behind it, but in true, the user is ahead of those images, 'almost invisible'.

This was helpful to Mack even more now, because with the change in his fighting style, he would need to get even more close to his targets to be able to finish them, and this spell, was perfect for it, because anyone seeing Mack move would see only his blurred 'copies' and obviously try to attack them, it would take a few tries to someone finally understand what was happening and predict Mack movements or use another spell to cancel the 'Shadow Steps', and by then, Mack hoped he already was at his target neck.

The only problem was the 'Shadow Steps' was a spell and not a rune circuit, thus, Mack would need to change how it worked because several parts used things that were not runes, but other dialects or even mage symbolism, runes was the only thing Mack cared for, he knew why they had a mixed modern system, but he didn't care about that, he somehow felt that was a waste of time to learn anything else that was not runes.

Mack flipped the page again and read the rest of the spell, because there, was the required materials to use this spell, 'So troublesome', thought Mack reading that he would need powder of the skin of a black chameleon to create the spell.

Mack understood why they opted for it, things had they own will and could affect the surrounding essence to some degree, this use of chameleon skin powder was a way to simplify the spell and make it easier to use and less draining on the user. They used it as a catalyst, just like mages often used staffs.

Mack grabbed a pen and a paper from inside his backpack, and started to draw runes on it while looking at the pages from the book that depicted the spell, changing his gaze back to his piece of paper and drawing new runes on it, sometimes changing some, sometimes scratching the entire circuit and starting a new one.

Mack was trying to translate the spell to a rune circuit, and just like that, time flew by. 

A few hours later, with the rumbling of his stomach, and feeling the hunger, Mack stopped.

"Damn it, I was too focused on this," said Mack aloud, realizing he had lost track of time and was hungry already, 'Let's stop for today, I will continue tomorrow'.

He put the papers aside and went to take a bath, but in the middle of his steps he stopped and as if forgetting something, he scratched his head but could not remember what he had forgotten.

'OH!! the lizard thing hide! I will need some....', thought Mack, remembering that he still had that part of the spell to figure out how it worked.

Mack's guess was that he would need to improvise, but he would still need the black chameleon skin powder to be able to understand its effects and try to mimic it using runes.

Once that line of thought formed in his mind, he used the advantages of his mind link and said in his mind, 'Old man, I will need some black chameleon skin powder. Try to find some for me, but don't make a fuss, I'm trying to create a runesspell based on the shadow steps.'

[I will order for you using the Horus Network.. Lorin will deliver to you tomorrow.]