Chapter 1722 - 239 - Give Up (4)

"Kaori," I said quietly.

I looked down at her as she slowly lifted her head and stared back at me, her expression carrying a kind of exhaustion that was difficult to miss even from a distance. Her hair had fallen messily over her eyes, covering most of her face, although I could still see her eyes peeking through the strands whenever she looked directly at me.

She looked really bad, and I mean genuinely bad.

She looked like she hadn't been eating properly for quite some time, and judging from the dark circles underneath her eyes, she probably hadn't been sleeping well either. Her entire appearance made it seem like she had spent the past few days doing little more than sitting around and replaying the same miserable thoughts in her head until she had practically worn herself down.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, her voice sounding noticeably weaker than usual. "Are you going to lecture me again because I couldn't do what you told me to do and ended up getting Ayaka hurt in the process?"

I went quiet after hearing that, mostly because I could tell from the way she said it that she had already been thinking about the same thing over and over again.

I wasn't going to lecture her, especially since she clearly understood what had gone wrong during the battle and already knew that her actions had nearly gotten Sakai killed in the process. From the look in her eyes, she didn't need another person standing in front of her and explaining how badly she had screwed up, because she seemed perfectly capable of reminding herself about it without anyone's help.

Still, it seemed like she had been deliberating over it constantly, turning the entire battle over in her head and finding another reason to blame herself whenever she reached the end of the memory.

"I know I messed up," she said quietly, lowering her gaze toward the ground. "I know it's my fault, so you don't have to come here and put it right in front of my face again."

Her voice carried far more frustration toward herself than toward me.

"Are you going to give up, then?" I asked her.

"Give up?" she repeated.

A faint, bitter smile appeared on her face as she continued looking downward.

"Heh... that's right," she said quietly. "I should just give up, shouldn't I?"

The situation was worse than I had initially thought, because I had expected her to be depressed about the battle and maybe even angry with herself, but I hadn't realized just how badly the incident had affected her until I actually saw her sitting there like this.

Her failure during the battle hadn't simply made her regret what happened.

It had shaken her badly enough that her entire mental state seemed to have collapsed under the weight of it, leaving her much more delicate than I had ever seen her before.

"I should just give up..." she muttered. "I mean, there's nothing we can do anyway. This world won't allow us to leave."

She slowly wrapped her arms around herself, almost as though she were trying to hold herself together while continuing to speak.

"I mean, how are we supposed to leave when this world is so cruel to us? It doesn't even let us breathe properly, and I feel like it keeps making everything harder for us whenever we finally think we're getting somewhere. How am I supposed to survive in a world that doesn't even seem willing to be kind to us?"

A few tears began gathering in her eyes before eventually slipping down her cheeks.

"You know..." she continued, wiping at her face with the back of her hand. "I don't want to die in this world. That's why I joined this war in the first place, because as much as possible, I want to die in my own world. I want to wallow in my regrets about that world, and I don't want my final moments to happen here instead."

She gave a small, humorless laugh that barely sounded like a laugh at all.

"I already have enough regrets waiting for me back there, so I'd rather deal with those than die here without even getting the chance to go back."

Her expression tightened as she looked away from me.

"But... I don't even get that privilege."

Her fingers suddenly moved into her hair, clutching at it tightly as her shoulders trembled.

"I won't even get to see my Mom and Dad before I die," she said, her voice cracking slightly. "I won't even get the chance to say goodbye to them properly. Why did it have to be like this?"

She pulled at her hair again, looking completely overwhelmed by everything she had been keeping bottled up.

I remained silent for a moment before finally speaking.

"If you really want to go home, then isn't it natural for you to refuse to give up?" I asked her.

"Then tell me how I'm supposed to do that," she replied almost immediately. "I feel like I won't even make it to the point where I'd actually be able to accomplish something like that."

She looked at me with an expression that was almost pleading, as though she wanted me to give her some kind of answer that would magically make everything easier.

I didn't have one.

At least, I didn't have some brilliant answer that could solve everything immediately.

Even so, I knew what I could tell her.

"You have to go home," I told her firmly.

For a moment, she simply stared at me.

"Heh..." she said after a while, a faint smile appearing on her face. "For some reason, you sounded like someone I know when you said that."

Her expression changed slightly after she said those words.

"For a while now, I've had this feeling that you... and that person are actually the same person," she said. "I know that doesn't make any sense, because that person died before we were transported here, so there shouldn't be any possible way for you to be the same person."

She paused as though she were trying to convince herself of what she had just said.

"That person was already dead before any of this happened, so logically, you couldn't possibly be him. I know that much, and I know how ridiculous the idea sounds when I actually say it out loud."

She looked down for a moment before slowly raising her eyes toward me again.

"But for some reason, even though I don't know why, I keep getting that feeling," she admitted. "I keep thinking that you're the same person."

I went completely silent after hearing that.

She was saying that the person she thought I resembled and I were somehow the same person, even though she believed there was absolutely no way that could possibly be true.

The strange part was that she was actually right.

In my previous life, I had been her childhood friend.

I was the person she was remembering.

I was the person that had died before they were transported into this world.

I had no idea why she was able to sense something like that, especially when I had done everything I could to keep my identity hidden. There shouldn't have been anything obvious connecting my current self to the person I had once been, and yet somehow, Kaori had managed to notice something that even I hadn't expected her to pick up on.

She wasn't merely close to the truth.

She had somehow hit the truth almost perfectly.

"But now that I think about it, there's no possible way you could actually be the same person," she said eventually, giving me a wry smile as though she had finally talked herself out of the ridiculous thought. "Although both of your personalities suck, at least Tsubasa had the decency to comfort me whenever I was down instead of outright shouting at me whenever I made a mistake."