Chapter 16: Captured
Kaizer was frowning internally because he could not sense a hint of Rina's thoughts still. Usually, the minds of others were like an open sea where he could catch the 'waves' of their thoughts, but Rina was like a scene of blackness, as if her thoughts had been censored by some program and made inaccessible to him.
It did not matter whether he made eye contact or increased the intensity of his telepathic power, there simply wasn't anything to glean. This was what puzzled Kaizer, because it couldn't possibly be that his cousin had no thoughts at all?
Or was she trained to conceal her mind from psychic inspection? However, while that theory was fun and seemed like it might lead to interesting developments, it was logically impossible since Rina had been like this since they were kids.
They spent all their time together back then too, so Kaizer was sure she did not have some secret master who taught her this specific ability to guard against him. Not to mention that she was too young to learn something like that, even if she was a transcendent genius never seen before.
Kaizer's working theory was that, someway, somehow, his cousin had the natural talent of blocking out psychic intrusion. Just like there could be someone like him who was born with a special ability like psychomancy, so too could there be one who was born with the ability to resist or negate psychomancy.
Seeing that Rina was still struggling to respond, Kaizer was about to release his focus when he noticed that a short, somewhat fat man wearing a tophat as well as a striped tuxedo had appeared behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder casually.
"Young man, let's have a chat somewhere quiet," Barnes spoke coldly.
Before Kaizer could even react, he felt his surroundings warp crazily, and when things came into focus, he was standing within an abandoned warehouse's main storage room. All around him was a cleared area where boxes had been pushed to the side, and he himself was placed within a cage that gleamed in the low lighting of the room.
Kaizer immediately calmed himself and glanced at those who stood before him. There were three men: the fat one who just brought him over, shutting the cage and locking it; one who resembled Dick Dastardly with the addition of a goatee; and finally, a nondescript man who seemed out of place in this environment.