Chapter 23: Asakura and Shin

Introducing himself as the man who ran the facility, Asakura offers to help Lu and Tanaka escape. Lu assumes the boss must be her kidnapper and lunges at him, but he points out that he too is a prisoner. When she demands the full story, he explains that he oversaw the Okutabi Lab yet has no idea who now controls it. Roughly six days and thirteen hours earlier, an armed group seized the place, most of them assassins by what he overheard, and they locked him away once he refused their orders. He does not know why Lu was taken either. Rounding on Tanaka, Lu blames him for mistaking her for Shin and abducting her, and Asakura asks whether she means Shin the clairvoyant. Surprised he knows the name, Lu learns that Asakura is the one who gave Shin his powers; she had assumed Shin was simply born with them.

A flashback fills in the history. Shin arrived as a small, bratty child, left in Asakura's care when an old friend named Ando vanished. Asakura, who disliked children and doubted his ability with them, slowly grew into a father figure. He told the curious boy he was building superhuman abilities and promised a demonstration once he succeeded, and Shin fiercely defended the work whenever other researchers scoffed. One day Asakura finished a promising compound, and as he compared it against older data, a drowsy, thirsty Shin drank it by accident. The boy soon manifested mind reading and amused himself by bluntly voicing the private thoughts of the staff, who began keeping their distance. Wracked with guilt, Asakura set out to brew a drug that would strip the power away, but Shin insisted the research was not foolish. Unable to bear the dreary scientists any longer, Shin walked out of the lab.

Asakura confesses he has dreaded facing Shin ever since. Lu reassures him that Shin harbors no grudge and genuinely likes his ability, adding that she envies how it lets him speak with Sakamoto. She proposes they apologize together and cites the Sakamoto household's eleventh rule, which requires patching up any quarrel before the day ends. Since this apology is badly overdue, she suggests sweetening it with a treat and notes that Shin adores cotton candy. Relieved, Asakura joins her, and the two set off with escape and a proper apology as their twin objectives.

Asakura, the imprisoned former head of the Okutabi Lab, allies with Lu and Tanaka to break out. He recounts that an armed band of assassins overran the facility days earlier and jailed him for defying them. Through flashback, it emerges that Shin's clairvoyance came from accidentally drinking one of Asakura's experimental compounds rather than from birth, and that Shin left the lab over the strained atmosphere. Lu convinces a guilt-ridden Asakura to apologize to Shin, invoking a Sakamoto family rule about mending quarrels the same day.

The Japanese title Asakura to Shin renders as Asakura and Shin. Belonging to the Lab Arc, the chapter runs nineteen pages, carries a cover featuring Lu Shaotang, Asakura, and Tanaka, and appeared in the twenty-fourth issue of 2021 within Volume 3. Shin, Tada, and Namiki feature in flashback. The chapter follows Chapter 22 and precedes Chapter 24.