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The girl with long, straight pink hair speaks with a trembling voice.
"A-Arata...?"
She looks at me with wide eyes, and her glasses have slid down her small nose becoming crooked, which makes her look quite adorable.
I, who suddenly feel like a ghost under her astonished gaze, scratch the back of my neck and look away toward the window.
"Yep, it's me..."
What an awkward situation, damn it.
Saya comes out of her surprise taking a step back with uncertainty, then takes a step forward again, before standing still in place with her hands pressed against her skirt. It seems her head just went blank and now she doesn't know what to do or how to react.
Her orange eyes travel over my face attentively, then rise to my head examining every detail before returning to look directly into my eyes. She's trying to confirm if the boy standing in front of her really is me or if someone replaced me during the night.
"Is it really you...? A parasite hasn't eaten you, has it?"
Saying that, she seems ready to flee.
I give her a knock on the head. Or rather, I give her a gentle tap on the head.
"Hey! What's with that hit!"
She protests while rubbing the area where I hit her, and I see the tension that enveloped her finally disappears.
"It's okay. You're the same fool as always. So tell me, how did your hair change...? Did you dye it? Finally! That color didn't suit you."
She approaches timidly and extends her hand toward me before pulling a lock of my hair with a doubtful expression.
"Of course not. I don't need something like dye to be handsome, you know?"
She rolls her eyes and releases my hair with a snort.
"Hmph! Who cares about that. But how is it possible then? Is it a wig?"
Having said this, she squeezes my hair again and again, until I grab her hand.
"Hey, stop! It hurts!"
In fact, now I can clearly feel pain since all my senses work properly. However, this type of pain, being unable to feel it all this time, is enjoyed.
"Ah, really? Good!"
She turns around and sits on the bed with her arms crossed, looking away, apparently angry.
But I understand her feeling since it must be shocking to see this change. After all, my hair before was a dirty ash color that looked like dust accumulated on a wig, or like the gray hair of your dying grandfather who smokes three packs a day. That horrible color was mainly because my body wasn't entirely alive, so the hair grew without proper pigmentation.
Now my hair is black. It looks like I used completely black paint to bathe it, leaving it shiny and healthy.
I run my hand through my hair and enjoy the soft, silky sensation. It's very different from my rigid hair that seemed like dry straw.
"Hah... well, for some reason it changed color."
"Oh? And your eyes...".
My eyes are also no longer opaque and cloudy like those of a dead fish that kicked the bucket three days ago. When I had looked at my image reflected in the glass of that closed store, the first thing that caught my attention was precisely my eyes.
They're blue eyes, bright and full of life, like the cloudless sky.
It's quite rare if I'm honest, since I never had eyes like this either in my previous life or in this one. Although I'm deeply grateful they weren't crimsom eyes like a vampire.
"They also changed, as you can see."
Well, she's never seen how my eyes really were in their natural state since I always used contact lenses to hide how cloudy and dead they looked.
"It's strange. You look different... but at the same time the same..."
She gets up and approaches again. She runs her fingers across my face while pressing her fingertips against my cheeks, pinching them slightly. Her gaze is full of curiosity and confusion, but the crimson aura around her, the affection she feels for me, hasn't diminished in the slightest.
"Your skin is quite white and soft..."
I finally managed to get rid of that sickly grayish skin color that made everyone look at me with disgust and fear.
Now it's milky white, maybe too white as if someone had cut my throat and all my blood had drained out drop by drop.
Well, overall I no longer look like a zombie at all. I look like a healthy, normal boy, although perhaps too pale like those magazine models who never see the sun.
If I looked at myself in the mirror once more, I'd undoubtedly curse myself for being too damn handsome.
'Hehe... I'm incredible. Girls are going to fall at my feet.'
Maybe I'm being a bit narcissistic, but after spending years looking like a walking corpse, I think I deserve to enjoy my new appearance a bit.
"!!!"
She stays touching my face, before realizing and pulling her hand away abruptly with a red face. She sits back on the bed looking away with her arms crossed.
"Hmph! So you finally decided to make yourself a bit more handsome, huh? Is that it? I thought you had no hope left."
Saya tries to appear indifferent and her tone of voice seems brusque. But she can't hide her curiosity or the affection she feels for me. Despite her attempt to act tsundere, her crimson aura continues pulsing strongly.
"Wow, thanks."
I sit next to her on the bed and she startles a bit. I look toward the ceiling with a smile on my face.
"So, I don't look like a monster anymore, right?"
She turns her neck to look at me more comfortably, and placing her hand on her thigh, she adopts a serious posture.
"Mm... Although I don't like it when people say Arata is a monster... somehow it always made me angry. But it's true you weren't normal."
Can't deny that.
"What happened to you, Arata?"
I sigh heavily and decide to start from the beginning.
"Do you remember what I was like when you first met me?"
Saya nods and says carefully choosing her words.
"You looked like a walking corpse, or at least someone very malnourished who hasn't eaten properly in months..."
I chuckle because she's considerably softened her words now compared to those first days.
"Haha, how kind you are now. When we met, I almost made you faint because I had grabbed your arm and pretended to be a zombie growling like an idiot."
When Rei brought Saya to meet me.
Those were good times. Well, not really, but at least it was fun to see her face of terror.
For some time after that incident, she addressed me as "that thing" or "the ghoul boy" instead of using my name. She wasn't very subtle with her disgust.
"S-shut up. Don't remind me of that."
"Heh... Anyway, have you ever wondered why I looked like that?"
Why I looked like the living dead.
Saya is quite intelligent, so it would be extremely strange if she hadn't wondered at some point. It's also very possible she suspected something and reached a conclusion quite close to the truth.
She lets out an indignant snort and showing her cute fang that peeks between her pursed lips, says with a tone of obviousness.
"Of course I've wondered, do you think I'm an idiot? I always thought you were one of those ghouls that eat people, and that's why I kept away from you when we met..."
Having said that, she didn't ignore me like the other children or treat me as if I really were a monster.
Pausing, Saya's expression softens a bit.
"But after several months living with you, and seeing how you act with Rei and me, I thought you didn't seem like a people-eating monster and I started trusting you little by little. So I told myself that maybe you were just very sick and that's why you looked so horrible."
I tell her with a smile.
"Um, you were partly right. I was very sick. In fact, I wasn't alive."
Huh?
She looks at me confused, as if she hadn't understood what I just said.
I prepare myself mentally.
Should I really do this? Should I tell her the whole truth? But I can no longer hide it from her, especially now that my appearance has changed so drastically.
So I must do it properly, carefully, so as not to scare her too much and have her run away screaming.
"Saya, do you know what a zombie is?"
"What's with that weird question? Of course I know what they are, since we often watch those kinds of movies on Halloween. They're brainless walking dead that eat brains of living people. Tsk! Silly movies. Zombies? Ghouls and parasites may exist, but living corpses... that's impossible."
I smile while watching her complain from the side.
If she knew this world was originally a zombie apocalypse one...
"It's something like that. But it seems that in reality not all zombies are the same as in the movies, since some may be able to think or speak normally..."
Although so far I'm the only one who has intact consciousness and personality. While the zombie-ghouls that vampires make when they bite humans have no will of their own and are just puppets.
Well, I myself can't be considered a normal zombie, much less now that I've repeatedly evolved beyond that classification.
Saya adjusts her glasses on her nose pushing them with her index finger, and narrowing her eyes suspiciously, asks cautiously.
"Why are we suddenly talking about zombies? What does this have to do with you?"
I stop, and look directly into her crystalline eyes, and read the emotional frequencies emanating from her.
She's confused, while also worried about me, and I can see and feel something deep and heavy in her emotions, something that makes my chest feel warm.
After a second or two I open my mouth.
"Because I was born as one, Saya."
Hearing what I just confessed, Saya stares at me without blinking even once while her lips open slightly in shock.
"What...?"
"I was born a zombie, even though my parents were normal humans. But as you surely imagine, when my biological parents saw their newborn baby with gray corpse skin and cloudy dead eyes, they were so scared they almost died of fright themselves and abandoned me."
I say all that in one breath, and honestly I expected to see fear reflected in Saya's eyes, but it seems I completely underestimated this girl because I only see surprise in her expression and nothing more.
She sighs, and gives the impression of being a person who just solved a mystery that's been bothering her.
"So that's how it is. That explains a lot. You really were a real zombie and not just a sick child..."
She shakes her head, and pausing briefly, bites her lip.
"But I suppose something else must have happened recently, right? You often changed. Whether it's how you behave when you touch my head seeming very pleased, or when you come home being a bit taller, or with a bit more flesh and muscle..."
As expected of her. She always knew I wasn't normal.
An intense look is directed at me from behind her glasses.
"Not to mention you're completely different now. So go ahead, continue the story."
"Um, you're right. Since I was born a zombie, I had several parts of my body completely screwed up and not working properly. My brain was slowly rotting, so day by day I lost my memories. My blood barely circulated through my body as it should... I also couldn't feel normal things. Whether it was pain when someone hit me, or even the simple wind on my skin, or the sun's warmth. I couldn't feel all that because my nerves were dead. But all that has changed now, because I was a zombie."
Even though she's sitting in an upright position with her hands resting on her thighs, I see how she clenches her fists when she realizes the situation I've had to go through.
While tears shine in her pupils without falling, she bites her lips, emitting frequencies of sadness.
It was when she hears my final phrase...
"You were? So you're not anymore...?"
She asks with hope shining intensely in her eyes.
I can feel what she's thinking at this moment.
Saya hoped with all her heart that I had become a normal, ordinary human again. Someone who could live a common life without supernatural worries.
Sadly that sweet hope is destined to be shattered to pieces as soon as I open my mouth to tell the truth.
"Yes, I'm no longer a zombie because I evolved several times by eating things that made me change..."
Saya's shoulders tremble slightly at those words, and she says in a low voice.
"Evolving from a zombie to something else... That sounds amazing but also terrifying..."
She crosses her arms.
"What exactly have you become, onii-chan? What are you now? And what do you mean by eating things?"
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pa-treon.com/OlwinMoriarty