主妇丈夫倡导的户外生活

When Harker started to feed on her, Victoria did put up a fight for a while, accelerating the freezing process on Harker. 

But Harker\'s determination somehow overpassed hers. And he knows just how much willpower Victoria had. She will lose only when she chooses to lose, or caught off guard by tricks and cheating. That was what happened when \'Joan\' defeated her, and that\'s what\'s happening right now.

Harker wasn\'t beating her fair and square. But it didn\'t matter now, as he needed to hurry up in consuming her. 

Thanks to his bigger Absorption Limit, he can still consume a Legion-like entity that was made of so many cells of other individuals. Harker gnawed on her arms, her abdomen, going in all directions like a rabid dog that lost its marbles.

Victoria stopped looking for the Shard for a moment, to speak in almost a mocking way.

"Ah, how fitting. Being consumed by men once again."

Harker felt a surge as this somehow made him notice how Victoria\'s memories were slowly slipping into his own mind. Her childhood, her transformation of her entire family into an undead, and the life she leads after. 

Harker tried to remain focused on consuming her, but it was like trying to get past a snowstorm with the snow already reaching up to his waist. And the cold was unbearable, sinking deep into his bones.

The worst part was the numbness from the cold. The numbness seemed to reach his very soul.

Was this also what happened to Victoria? 

This endless despair to the point that it had numbed down every single emotion from you, that you have come to accept that you the void was simply a part of you. Almost like Joan.

No, he was wrong. It was different from Joan\'s. For Victoria, it wasn\'t that the void had always been a part of her.

She was simply a part of the void, and nothing else. 

Harker felt like he just wanted to stay still, to listen to the slow and weak beating of his heart. To perceive the world with eyes that does nothing but watch, and not really react to it. An empty barren tree in a state of never-ending internal catatonia, where he does move but only mechanically.

Yes, we are just ghosts caged inside hollow machines. And when that machine stopped working...

Victoria had seen how that machine stopped working at the age of 5.

All of its tiny processes as it happened. The small spasms, the changes in breathing, the light disappearing from their eyes. She saw it happen to her mother first, then to her father. The snow had fallen into their faces, mixing with the blood frothing from their mouth and the other holes in their bodies. 

The war had left their town to be just a part of the void, of the winter wasteland where they had made their settlement. The British soldiers went away with their horses clip-clopping into the distance, not realizing that they had left one of them alive.

"Holle….. Lauf weg, Holle." 

That was her father\'s last words before he met his end. Before his body doesn\'t work anymore. 

"Run away, Holle."

But Little Holle did not run away. She stayed there, observing how the machine deteriorated after it stopped working. She looked around to see if it was the same for everyone, and it was.

What is the point of one person\'s individuality, their character, their principles…. If they all end up the same way?

Their faces become pale, all liquids abandon their body, they grow stiff, their hair and nails extending and becoming fragile enough to be pulled out so easily….. Man, woman, elderly, children, everything in between.

Because of witnessing this, young Holle had found it always strange why humanity bothered to have wars among themselves, to fight each other for dominance, to try to run away from this fate that they will eventually meet.

But young Holle, who had been simply watching bodies for the past three days under the snowstorm, was taken to become Victoria.

The child was hungry, and yet she didn\'t cry or look for food. She was in a constant state of catatonia where she would just stare emptily at the British men who lifted her up and placed her in a carriage. Even when they tried to talk to her, whether it was in kind German or insults in English, she would not speak.

"It is like a doll. Might as well sell her up to be a servant in some sweatshop." She heard one of them say.

And they must be right. Holle was an empty doll, and Victoria was the dressed up version. In the end, she didn\'t become a toy doll for a sweatshop, but a toy doll for a wealthy man named Alphonse Seward.

Alphonse had put much effort in dressing up and playing with Victoria. He used his other toys to interact with her. The tutor, the seamstress, the cook, the nanny…. They all played a role with their machine-like bodies for his satisfaction.

When Victoria talked about men, it doesn\'t mean that she had a distaste for men as a sex. In males. When she speaks of men….

It was people like Alphonse. 

Men were those that orchestrated the roles to play, while the rest were puppets, actors, machines. Men were the ones who decide the roles, who decide the script, who pulls everyone in strings and cuts those strings whenever and however they choose.

Victoria had seen it happen once. The poor gardener. He turned out to be cutting some of the roses he grew in the garden to sell for some penny to support his young daughter.

In the end, he had his head cut off for a crime he did not commit. 

That was how easy men played with those beneath them.

But Victoria always knew better. Deep down, though she played the role Alphonse gave her diligently as the \'grateful adoptive savage than had been tamed\', she knew that when men died, they die just like those that serve them.

"What disgusting looking worm. Euk!" She heard her little sister Joan say as she stepped on a worm whilst walking up the steps aged 11.

She too, had a role to play. But she could easily just become as powerful as these men if Victoria loses in this script. And when that happens….

Will Victoria\'s strings be cut off? Will she also become like the worm?

A voice in her head beckoned to her:

\'Run away, little worm. Run away before you get stepped on.\'

So that was what she did. Despite knowing that the end comes for us all and knowing how it happens... She ran away from Death by performing even more diligently with her machine body, her machine heart beating with determination. Even when Joan slowly became more and more rebellious in their teenage years, she did not take the chance to falter and lose her head.

Yet of course, it was never enough.