Psychic Overlord

Kaizer had initially suspected this, because it was right after his first battle with Blaze that the document was sent to his father. Now, with the old man confirming it, Kaizer understood that his current inclusion into the esper world was thanks to him.

"Why did you do it?" Kaizer asked prudently, not lowering his guard.

Blaze yawned. "Why not? At the time, I didn’t know you had just awakened, thinking you were a hidden esper. On top of that, you could actually detect my subordinate and even strike me between the legs, which showed you had endless potential. With the right teaching and training, you could go from a useless rich second generation to a functional member of society."

Kaizer did not reply, but his tense shoulders relaxed significantly. Blaze glanced at the two women and two men that Kaizer protected with a raised eyebrow.

"Aren’t you going to kill these pieces of waste? You should know that the fewer people who know about your telepathy, the better," Blaze suggested bluntly, not caring about the horror on the faces of the four.

Kaizer pointed to Barnes and Lyle. "I want to take them back for interrogation about the inner workings of the Ancients and the situation regarding my sister."

Blaze nodded. "Old dog William already told me, which was why I came here. He was worried about you and threatened me to come check on you, otherwise, he would break my old legs."

He then glanced at Barnes and Lyle with a slight smile. "As for these two, they won’t prove much use. You’re dealing with that pretentious bastard Solaris, and according to the Supreme Force’s intel, what that little girl said is correct. That pretentious freak is playing both sides, but this is an open conspiracy that you will learn about if your mentor is willing to explain."

Kaizer hesitated, glancing at Barnes and Lyle, who immediately glanced back at him with a mixture of fear and hope. Naturally, after coming this far, even if they were to become prisoners, they were not willing to die.

"Don’t forget your thoughts just before we first met," Blaze said softly, his eyes uncharacteristically serious.

Kaizer remembered when he was standing in front of the memorial for the students of his school whose thoughts and secrets he had dug out over the course of the initial week of his awakening. This included the three girls who had a severe crush on him and the one who even planned to propose to him after Rina’s usual harassment back then.

All of them were part of the mound of bloody corpses back then, of which Rina would have been a part had she not had superpowers. In truth, their target back then had been Kaizer and they could have easily kidnapped him without performing the attack, but they still did, and they never thought about the consequences after.

Those mothers who had fallen to their knees sobbing and screaming in agony because their child who just texted them for money the night before was now a corpse. Fathers lost daughters, mothers lost sons, and siblings lost their only blood relation in this world.

Barnes was confused by what Blaze said, but Lyle, who was carefully watching Kaizer, saw the young man go from hesitant to silent and then to coldness. His pupils constricted greatly as he knew death was upon him, so he spoke hurriedly.

"Kaizer, wait! It was completely Leo’s idea to initiate the attack because he suspected that your killing of Carla was linked to the Supreme Force! Barnes and I do not have the ability to plan or mobilize such forces as mere D rank espers!"

Barnes understood the problem now, and he could not help but feel speechless. So at the end of it all, it was because of the death of some non-espers that their lives were hanging in the balance? How—

SPLAT!

Barnes’ head immediately exploded, splattering his blood and brain matter all over Lyle beside him. Lyle, for that matter, trembled greatly, guessing immediately that Barnes was killed by Kaizer because of his thoughts.

In fact, Lyle was not completely clueless. As an Esper at the D rank with a non-combat auxiliary type esper ability, he was technically at the bottom of the esper world. Other espers treated him barely better than a non-esper, so he did not have much inherent disdain.

He joined the Ancients because they exalted espers—all espers—and disdained non-espers, so Lyle had changed in terms of mentality over time by not caring much about non-espers compared to before, but he did not actively disdain them.

This seemed to be the only reason he was alive, as he knew his thoughts couldn’t be hidden from Kaizer.

Kaizer walked over and placed a hand on Lyle’s head, cruelly invading his mindscape, which was nowhere near as fortified as the one Carl had. Piercing within, Kaizer saw a vast space that extended into the distance, full of stars like a platform floating through space.

Unlike Rina’s, Lyle’s mindscape was not as condensed nor intense. It felt rather empty and poorly put together, extremely chaotic, like the typical thoughts of a normal person. Inspired by Carl, Kaizer released psychic power through his mental incarnation and invaded this space, applying his control over it all.

Kaizer immediately had access to Lyle like never before. He could view the man’s memories freely, whether in a detached point of view or in first person to experience everything within.

Kaizer flipped through like a person using their mouse to fast-forward a YouTube video, looking at the frames to get a quick idea of this guy’s life.

After looking through, Kaizer had to admit he was a tragic soul because he awakened at the age of 14 and ended up accidentally hypnotizing his crush without realizing it. She ended up accepting his confession, but her other suitors in Lyle’s private school could not believe she would go with this loser, so he suffered because of it.

Later, he was out on a date with her when he was kidnapped along with her and taken to a warehouse for ransom. Since they attended a rich private school in Epsilon City, their uniforms gave them away and marked them as targets for these spur-of-the-moment kidnappers who were desperate for cash for narcotics.

During the ransom, one fellow tried to play with his crush, in which the furious Lyle activated his powers and hypnotized the guy, making him kill all his associates and free them. At that moment, Lyle did not care about the dead as he understood from his crush’s blank expression that she had likely been hypnotized and would never have accepted him otherwise.

As such, he counter-hypnotized her to be free of any influence he had on her, and she immediately reacted as one would expect, with horror at the thought that she had actually been so close to such a loser when she had better suitors.

When the police came, she even reported that Lyle had drugged her in some way, and if it wasn’t for the fact that various tests came up negative, the young man’s life would have been ruined. However, his faith in humanity had been shattered, and his confusion over his newly awakened powers led him to abscond from the bright life planned for him by his parents and enter the underworld.

He quickly became a small-scale underworld boss relying on his powers until he came into conflict with a younger Barnes who was holding two women in each hand. When he tried to hypnotize Barnes, he experienced his first setback and was eventually beaten up by the fellow.

After that, a friendship formed and Barnes brought Lyle into the esper world, where both men refused to join the Esper Academy nor the Supreme Force, being a small-scale esper faction that handled underworld-related tasks from the Esper Commission.

Things were fine until they took on a bad job to take down an esper who turned out to be with the Ancients, causing them to be captured and given a choice—either join the Ancients or die. As such, the duo joined and were soon indoctrinated slowly, Barnes completely falling while Lyle was somewhat convinced.

Kaizer left the memories alone and condensed his psychic power into a rune... which was basically the English word for ’Control’ in capitals, and branded it on the core of Lyle’s mental space, causing an intense rejection reaction, which Kaizer suppressed using his far stronger mental power.

After the brand was complete, his mental incarnation was retracted as Kaizer in the real world took his hands off the trembling Lyle’s head, his blank eyes coming back to life as there was a mixture of shock, terror, and surprise.

"I..." Lyle muttered weakly, but looking at the cold-faced Kaizer, he felt an innate reverence and fear in his heart, lowering his head subserviently.

Kaizer was surprised by the effectiveness of his actions. He simply wanted to control Lyle without removing his mental faculties and completely taking over like what Carl did, allowing Lyle to be ’himself’ but under Kaizer’s control.

As Anir said, you don’t ask someone who only had an idea of the logic behind something when you were gifted with natural talent in that field. As a telepath, who did Kaizer expect to teach him how to do this if not his own instincts and powers?