My Three Vampire Queens In The Apocalypse-Chapter 20: Curse of Regression

When I opened my eyes, I was inside a stomach. To be more precise, I was inside the stomach of a snake that was the size of a dragon.

The space around me was... absurdly large. People liked to think snakes had tight, suffocating insides, but that assumption clearly didn’t apply here. This creature was at least a hundred feet long and easily ten feet wide.

Yeah. This guy was doing just fine in the food department.

Thankfully, I had been swallowed whole, which was the only reason I was still alive. If its teeth had touched me once, I would have become go/jo on the spot and died.

The walls of the mother Titanoboa’s stomach around me pulsed slowly, as if the entire place was breathing, which it was.

The smell was unbearable, like a mix of rot and acid that clung to my skin and crawled into my lungs with every breath. Each second I stayed here, I was getting closer to death.

And yet, none of that bothered me as much as the thought running through my head.

I shouldn’t have trusted Victoria so easily.

Just because I had watched her journey for ten years, I had convinced myself that she would feel the same kind of bond toward me. I thought that if I reached out, if I stood beside her, she would recognize me in some way.

But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. To her, I was nothing more than a stranger who got in the way.

Victoria... was a sad existence.

She had lived the same life over and over again for far too long. The journey of [WOMD] was never something a single person was meant to endure even once, and yet she had carried it on her own, again and again, with no real end in sight.

In her first regression, she was... bright.

I still remember the moment she realized she had returned to the past. Her eyes lit up in a way that felt childish, like someone who had been handed back a life they thought they had already lost. She laughed, cried, and then immediately started planning.

She believed she could save everyone this time.

And she tried. She really did.

She pushed herself day and night without rest, moving from one scenario to the next with a determination that bordered on obsession. She gathered people around her, built a team, and slowly turned that team into something that resembled a family.

They trusted her, relied on her and followed her without hesitation. For a while... it almost looked like it might work.

But this was [WOMD].

Nothing ever went the way people hoped.

The scenarios grew harsher with each step forward. What started as difficult became cruel, and what was cruel eventually turned into something that felt outright malicious. The rules bent in ways that punished kindness, and the system rewarded those who were willing to abandon it.

One by one, people around her started to die. At first, Victoria couldn’t handle it.

She cried every time. Not just quiet tears, but the kind that shook her whole body. She would sit beside their bodies, whispering apologies that no one could hear anymore, blaming herself for every single loss.

I remember one night in particular. It was after a failed scenario where three of her teammates died at once. She didn’t sleep. She just sat there, staring at the empty space where they used to be, her hands trembling as if she was still trying to reach for them.

If anything, she was probably the kindest person I had ever seen. Not just in [WOMD], but even when compared to real life.

And that was exactly why she kept breaking.

Because no matter how hard she tried, no matter how much she sacrificed, people kept dying.

And in the end... she died too. Betrayed, exhausted and defeated.

Then came the second regression.

She was still kind, but something had changed. There was hesitation now, a careful distance in the way she interacted with people. She chose her companions more cautiously, trusted less easily, and always kept a part of herself guarded.

That was also the regression where she took in a child.

An adopted son.

I remember how different she looked around him. She was much softer and warmer. Like she had found a reason to keep going that wasn’t tied to saving the entire world.

They fought together, survived together, and for a while, it felt like she had finally found something worth holding onto.

But [WOMD] doesn’t allow people to keep what they love. Death came again, and this time, it was Victoria herself who had to take her son’s life just to move to the next scenario.

And even after the sacrifice of her son, she failed to liberate the world from scenarios. Maybe... that was where the real change began.

From the third regression onward, Victoria was no longer the same person. She became cold and distant.

She still moved forward, still cleared scenarios, still did what needed to be done... but the warmth she once had was gone. It was replaced by something hollow, something that felt like she was simply going through the motions because stopping wasn’t an option.

There were moments when she just stood still, staring at nothing, as if she was waiting for something to end.

At times, she even wanted to die.

Not in the way people usually say it, not out of fear or despair in a single moment, but as a quiet, lingering wish. It was the kind that builds up slowly after you’ve lost too much, after you’ve tried everything and nothing worked.

She thought she had fought enough. And eventually... she acted on that thought.

In her third regression, she chose to end her own life.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no last words, no grand gestures. She simply made a decision, one that came from a place far beyond exhaustion.

She believed that if the death was her own choice, if she stepped out of the cycle by her own will, then maybe... just maybe... it would finally end. Maybe there would be no more regression.

She wanted rest. She wanted silence.

She wanted to disappear.

But fate wasn’t kind enough to grant her even that. When she opened her eyes again, she was back.

Back in the same world.

Back at the beginning.

Forced to fight again. Forced to watch the same tragedies unfold in different forms. Forced to play along with the twisted entertainment of the [Constellations] and the cruel design of the [Starline].

Even her death... didn’t belong to her.