Slowly walking into the darkness of the alley, Alan kept looking around, the mana perception had allowed him to at least be able to partially see further into the darkness however as he quickly found out, It wasn't something that he could rely on completely.
Releasing a sigh, he quickly equipped his nightvision goggles as his vision turned green, the scene before him finally clear in his vision.
Walking down the road that was quite deteriorating, Alan saw something that he had never seen before, at least not in the other alleys.
The legs, heads and hands that he had seen the slimes devour before, they weren't just single limbs anymore and neither were the slimes eating them. It was a full on torso with both arms and the head still intact though the lower half seemed to have been almost completely erased as if it hadn't even been there in the first place. It was… the first body that Alan had seen inside the dungeon where he could come closer and check the features of the bodies.
Crouching down, Alan focused closer on the face, it wasn't exactly clear as he was looking through night vision however, the resemblance… it was uncanny. It wasn't exact, there were quite a lot of small differences that clearly made the facial shape different. However…
'This… he… it… it looks like a damn… like this person was a family… family member of mine. He looks fucking related to me.' Alan thought in pure shock, his hands starting to faintly shake, it was one thing to see someone dead, he had already seen ruined body parts, he had seen them get dissolved, he had seen the dead bodies of his friends move.
It was an entirely different situation to see someone that resembled him so closely. It was like he was looking at his own dead corpse in a way.
'What… what the fuck is going on? Is the system creating dead body copies of me or something? To to feed to the slimes so that it can actually create a ecosystem that works?' Alan thought instantly, as his mind whirled into action, it was a theory that made some sense, the system did create the slimes out of nothing but mana, it also created the entire environment around him.
'Then what is stopping it from creating… another me. Or a body of me, a clone.' Alan thought and the more he did, the more he came to the horror inducing realisation that there was indeed nothing stopping it. If he just thought about the systems current capabilities that he had seen, something like this wasn't far fetched, it was something that he could actually believe the system could do.
'Damned, damned it all.' Alan thought to himself as he released an exasperated sigh and slowly rose up to his feet before turning and looking deeper into the darkness further ahead, deeper into the alley.
Slowly starting his trek down the deteriorating road once more, Alan's eyes kepy swirling left and right, checking for anything that would give him any more clues, anything more. He had even tried using his Observation skill on the dead body that he had encountered before however he had only received the most basic of descriptions.
[ Observation Skill has been Activated! ]
[ Target Analysis Complete. ]
[ Name: Dead Body. ]
[ Description: A dead Human body. ]
'The fact that my observation, that leveled up, only gave me this much information, that It didn't tell me any of the background about the body, about anything at all… that is suspicious in and of itself.' Alan thought as he walked, holding the combat spear close and raised up infront of him, getting more and more on guard as he walked down the alley.
It was at that moment, that he heard it, it was the sound of footsteps, though… not exactly, it was a bit wrong, as if the footsteps were too light… too wide… it wasn't how the sound of human footsteps sounded like, it was close however, so close that it gave an uncanny sense that somehow only made the sound more terrifying than it should have been.
Something that closely resembled the sound of human footsteps and yet wasn't there yet, it had something missing, a small detail, a small thing here and there.
Alan's eyes instantly focused as his eyes narrowed behind his nightvision goggles.
Looking ahead of him, he quickly saw it, the thing that had been making the noise, what was walking on the broken gravel that had quickly deteriorated from concrete in a mere dozen meters.
Standing, a dozen feet away from him, standing on two feet was something that resembled a human shape, it had a head, two arms and two legs and yet it wasn't human, it was clearly made of slime gelatine, it was completely coloured in a light pink colour, it looked overall like a bad clay sculpture of a human made from a kid.
And yet it was the most horrifying Alan had seen inside the dungeon, because the slime wasn't trying to imitate a human shape, it wasn't trying to temporarily hold the shape, that was its natural state.
'Observe.' Alan thought almost instantly as his gaze was fixed on the abomination that stood before him.
[ Observe Skill has been activated! ]
[ Analysis on the target has started. ]
[ Analysis on the target has been completed successfully. ]