Rentarou sets off for a shopping trip with Shizuka, Kusuri, and Chiyo. On the way to the supermarket, Chiyo loses her glasses under a door while talking to Kusuri, whose aged up form reminds Chiyo of her mom, whose glasses she wears as a Tragic Keepsake. After Shizuka retrieves the glasses, the group arrives at the pharmacy, though Kusuri is briefly distracted by a gacha machine. While Kusuri starts browsing through ingredients for her drugs with Rentarou, Chiyo starts eyeing the makeup section with Shizuka.
The next stop is the bookstore, where Shizuka is planning to buy the next volume of Circlet Love Story. Rentarou helps Shizuka get the book from a high shelf, triggering flashbacks to their first meeting. While Rentarou watches two guys at a display selling volumes of the manga itself, he also spares a glance at the girls enjoying each other's presence.
After this, Chiyo goes shopping for groceries for the evening's dinner. Kusuri struggles with the shopping cart until Shizuka helps her, and Rentarou offers to help Chiyo carry her groceries so he can hold her hand.
The final stop is a restaurant selling Pentarou crepes. As they sit down to enjoy their snacks, Rentarou goes back inside to get a missing wafer for one of the crepes. In his absence, two older boys' roughhousing causes the other girls to drop their crepes and make a mess. In the ensuing confrontation, Kusuri splashes them with her magnetization drug, causing the boys to get stuck upside down together. Before they can retaliate, Rentarou scares them off with a pair of shopping carts before comforting the girls, finishing the crepes with them, and returning home.
Tropes:
- Beware the Nice Ones: Another example for Rentarou. Seeing the girls being threatened, he threatens the bullies by swinging two full-sized shopping carts, one for each hand.
- Brick Joke: Kusuri's human magnetization drug from Chapter 10 returns in this chapter, which Kusuri mentioned would cause two people to stick together upside down if they each consumed a dose with the same polarity.
- Call-Back: Rentarou getting a book on a high shelf for Shizuka triggers flashbacks to their first meeting from Chapter 3.
- Recursive Canon: The manga itself appears in a display at the bookstore.
- Self-Deprecation: Two guys at a display selling volumes of the manga itself call the title "cringy as hell" and mention how the title was supposed to be a joke but nobody got it, and the author wanted to "crawl in a hole and die" due to "being too ahead of the curve". Even the display says it's "So funny it'll obliterate your brain cells."
