"I see..." she mouthed quietly, although I could still hear the words clearly enough.
From the look on her face, it seemed like she had finally reached the same realization that had been slowly forming in my own mind. For quite some time, neither of us had been able to properly grasp what was actually connecting us, even though the answer had apparently been sitting right in front of us the entire time.
It wasn't simply about who we were now.
It was about who we had been before.
More specifically, it was about the relationship we had shared in our previous lives, before everything had changed and we had both somehow ended up becoming completely different people in completely different circumstances.
I still had no idea what had happened to Akane that eventually turned her into Shredica, and honestly, the more I learned about her current situation, the more questions seemed to appear instead of disappearing. Whatever had happened to her had clearly changed everything, because the Akane I remembered and the woman standing in front of me now were almost impossible to connect at first glance.
"So I'm right, aren't I?" she finally asked. "You are Tsubasa?"
"I am," I answered honestly.
I didn't bother trying to deny it this time.
There wasn't really any point in doing that anymore, especially when everything had already lined up far too perfectly for me to keep pretending otherwise. She had already noticed the similarities, her memories were apparently beginning to resurface, and somehow my name had remained buried somewhere inside her mind despite everything she had forgotten.
Trying to lie my way out of it at this point would have been pointless.
"Are you Akane?" I asked her in return.
The moment I asked that question, she stared at me for several seconds without giving me an answer.
Her expression slowly changed as she seemed to search through whatever remained inside her memories, almost as if she were desperately trying to find a name that should have been familiar to her but had somehow disappeared from her grasp.
"I don't know," she finally said.
I wasn't expecting that answer.
She genuinely didn't know.
Well, that certainly ruined my assumption that she had simply been hiding her memories from me for some reason.
It seemed that she really had lost them after whatever incident had happened to her, although I still had absolutely no idea what that incident actually was or how severe it had been.
"You don't know?" I asked again, mostly because I wanted to make sure I hadn't misunderstood what she had said.
"I don't have any memories from before I was found wandering through the forest back then," she explained. "A couple of doctors and researchers found me and took me in, and after that, they trained me to fight against something they called the Infection."
"The Infection?" I repeated.
That single word immediately caught my attention.
So something really had happened to Earth.
Until now, I had been trying to piece together what could have happened to Akane, but this was the first actual clue she had given me about the circumstances surrounding her transformation into Shredica.
If my understanding of the timeline was correct, then there was a massive difference between when she became Shredica and when the heroes had been summoned to this world.
The more I thought about it, the stranger the entire situation became.
When I died in my previous world, only a couple of days had passed there before I ended up here.
Meanwhile, several years had already passed in this world before the heroes were summoned.
That meant the amount of time passing between the two worlds was completely different.
If only a few days had passed when I died, then the time leading up to my death probably hadn't even lasted several weeks from the perspective of this world.
That realization made everything considerably more complicated.
Akane, or Shredica as she was now known, must have arrived here years after the heroes had already been summoned.
"I don't have any memories of who I was before that point," she continued. "All I know is that I was given the name Shredica, and I was placed into a unit whose job was to eliminate the Infected."
Her expression became slightly more serious as she continued explaining what had happened.
"We had been campaigning to reclaim some of the islands when I was suddenly transported to this place."
She paused briefly before looking directly at me.
"That's why I have to go back."
Her voice carried considerably more weight than before.
"That world needs me."
I suppose she really did want to return there more than anything else.
Honestly, that wasn't particularly surprising when I considered the kind of person she had become.
Shredica had always seemed like an extremely hotheaded and battle-hungry woman, and the first time I met her, she looked like someone who might kill another person simply because they happened to make eye contact with her for slightly too long.
Thinking about it now, though, perhaps there had been more behind that attitude than I originally realized.
She had been fighting for something.
She had apparently been part of a military unit, spent her time fighting the Infected, and had been working toward reclaiming territory before she was suddenly dragged into this world.
From her perspective, returning home wasn't simply about going back to a familiar place.
It was about returning to the people and purpose she had left behind.
"I asked you this because you seem to be the key to helping me find a way back home," she said. "Even after I helped the Commander summon the heroes, I couldn't get close to discovering anything that could actually lead me back."
She looked at me with a mixture of uncertainty and expectation.
"So I figured you were the person I needed to ask."
I remained quiet while she continued.
"The memories that I don't even understand have kept resurfacing whenever I hear the name Tsubasa."
That made sense.
Even if she couldn't remember who she had been, something inside her apparently still recognized my name.
Memories could disappear, but apparently they didn't always disappear completely.
Sometimes, all it took was the right name, the right face, or the right situation for something buried deep inside to start pushing its way back toward the surface.
She studied my face carefully for another moment before asking me the question that seemed to matter most to her.
"Are you really that person?"
Her expression became slightly uncertain as she continued staring at me.
"I'm asking because I want to make sure I'm not mistaken. The person I remember and you don't really look alike, but sometimes the image of him in my memories overlaps with you."
I hadn't expected that I would have to keep lying after finally admitting everything else, especially when the truth had already managed to catch up with us anyway.
There was hardly any point in denying it anymore.
"Yes," I finally said while looking directly at her. "I am that person."