The Perfect Specimen

Vague flashes of red and black lights flash through Alistair's eyes. A vision of dead animals, pieces of meat, dead people. He is subjected to many gruesome scenes.

He watches these scenes from inside the room that he felt so much fear towards. The room that he was able to properly understand and practice [Living Iron]. He looks around with a muddleheaded look, unsure of where he is or what he should be doing.

Looking back at the scenes playing in front of him like a broken recording that keeps playing the same loop over and over, he sees a figure start to appear in the looping scenes. A copy of himself walks out from the scenes, looking almost exactly like him.

However, there are differences between them. His copy is a bit taller, it actually has hair on the top of its hair, and it has a vicious smile on it's face as opposed to Alistair's befuddled expression. It looks almost as if it has finally found its long awaited prey after a long hunt.

"Who are you?" The befuddled Alistair asks absentmindedly.

"I'm the real you. The one that you strive to be, NEED to be."

It's voice is magnetically haunting, almost as if it were the sweet whispers of the reaper towards the recently deceased.

"I need to be you? Why can't I be me?"

"You can be you, but you will also be me. We are monsters, we must evolve or suffer the ultimate penalty. You have been running from your hunger and only eating enough to hold you over until the next pangs of hunger attack you."

"But I need to go to class and learn more techniques, I finally feel like I made a friend just like-"

"-Just like Beth said you would? Well congratulations, you made friends with a random human girl and are learning techniques that are useless to you. While you are wasting away your time learning things you don't need to, the real questions are getting pushed further and further to the back of your mind."

"The real questions? About the swirl in my body?"

The copy of himself splits off into multiple different copies of itself. Each of them varying slightly in appearance, and taking turns to speak a question back at Alistair.

"That's only one question! What about who you really are? Where did you actually come from? If you are a zombie, what was your life like prior to changing? How did you change? What happened to your family? You have a way to grow stronger right in front you with evolution, why not take it and find your answers?"

The copies voices starts trembling with frustration in the middle of their speech.

Being barraged by all of the questions that he has been trying to keep in check all this time causes him to snap out of his dazed state and become panicked.

"We are the next possible steps you need to reach before you can attain any of these answers. Not only that, if you do not reach us soon then you won't have anymore time to indulge in these make believe fantasies of being a normal human."

Are specific part stood out towards Alistair and caused a sense of uneasiness in him.

"What do you mean I won't have time?"

All of the forms merge back into the original copy of himself as it looks at Alistair as if it wanted to give its pity but felt too much contempt to.

"You are dying Alistair. Actually dying. A zombies body does not last long before the rot and decay of time takes them. The swirl in your body is mitigating the affect as of right now, but it won't last forever. The more you consume, the stronger your body becomes. The stronger your body becomes, the more food you will need to consume to supply proper energy to it."

Hearing this, Alistair takes a breath of relief as he finally believes he has a grip on the conversation and has a way to retort.

"I know that, but I have been getting by fine."

"Your last meal that you needed to satiate yourself with took an entire tribe of scralebits, the time before that was a small nest of rats in the sewer. If you keep upgrading your body with such trash materials in the future then the amount you will need to consume to stay alive would encompass the entire city of Utopia before the end of the year!"

Finally able to gain some useful information for his path forward, Alistair pushes for more concise information.

"Trash materials? What should I eat?"

"You need to eat those with actual power, not weaklings. Creatures with magical energy inside of them are perfect for expanding the swirl inside of you. The spiral inside of you causes magic inside of you to expand outwards.

It's not being rejected by the spiral. It's needed to make your spiral stronger. The stronger the spiral is, the less amount of food you will need to eat overall."

Suddenly, all of the information in Alistair's head clicks together. Everything that his copy has said to him has been nothing that he did not already think of. The only difference being that he was unable to put all of the pieces together on his own.

The copy of himself sees the light of realization in Alistair's eyes and knows that its mission is accomplished.

"This is the last time that you will be able to wrest control back from the spiral inside of you. The fact that you have consciousness at all unlike other zombies is a miracle in itself that needs to be figured out."

Unable to resist the morbid curiosity, Alistair asks a question that he already knows the answer to, wishing that he was wrong.

"What will happen to me if I lose myself to the spiral inside of me again?"

"I only have as much knowledge as you do to work with. If I had to guess though, your consciousness will be completely absorbed by the spiral inside of you and your body will act only on the instincts of the spiral which is to consume. Essentially, you will just be another zombie.

Either that or the spiral inside of you will grow out of proportion and begin devouring everything around it like a black hole, including you."

He knew it, he still hoped for a different outcome but knows that everything comes with a price.

After answering Alistair's last question though, his copy grabs him by the hand and begins walking towards the broken loop of images that have been playing in the background.

Just before it pulls Alistair through the projection, it stops him and says one final speech.

"After you walk through there, you must go on the hunt. If you want any chance of living a normal life happily with friends and a family, if you want to answer all of your questions, then you need to evolve.

If you don't want to die by lack of a proper diet, or a terrifying creature stalking you and waiting to eat consume you so it can evolve, you need to hunt and evolve."