Chapter 19

While Taro and Aoi attend a parents' event at Hana's school, the couple leaves the convenience store to Shin and Lu. On their own, the two clerks bicker without pause, trading jabs over chores, borrowed aprons, and Shin's habit of reading whatever crosses Lu's mind. When she admits that his mind reading keeps her permanently on edge, Shin quietly apologizes and walks off, and a visiting Heisuke fails to patch things up before she waves him away too.

Regretting her sharp words, Lu decides to treat Shin more gently once he comes back. Before she can, a group in white coats enters the store, spots the name stitched on the apron she borrowed, and hauls her off in the belief that she is the person they were sent for. Their talk reveals that a facility has spent more than a decade chasing an escaped subject, a gifted clairvoyant they prize as a rare success. Lu kicks back at her captors and stands up for her coworker, insisting that being unusual does not condemn someone to a lonely, miserable life.

Two operatives from the laboratory, Tanaka and Seba, make their first appearance and abduct Lu after mistaking her for Shin, whose name she happens to be wearing on the store apron. Their exchange establishes that the lab studies supernatural abilities and that Shin fled it roughly eleven years earlier, marking him as its prized clairvoyant specimen. Coming back to an empty shop and shattered glass, Shin realizes Lu is gone, and once the family returns Taro uses GPS trackers hidden inside the staff nametags to fix her position. The chapter closes with Taro and Shin tearing onto the freeway aboard a motorbike, with Taro declaring he has come to reclaim his employee.

Titled Fight, and rendered in Japanese as Kenka, this is the nineteenth installment of the series and appears in the third collected volume. It falls inside the Lab Arc and first reached print on April 12, 2021, in issue 19 of that year. Both Tanaka and Seba debut here, while the cover pairs Shin with Lu Shaotang. The story picks up from the preceding chapter and leads straight into the next.