As the floating platform descended with the grace of a falling feather, the crowd of people made room for it. Whence it landed, the weary headmaster stepped off, stridently approaching Azriel. His eyes squinted, curious yet precautious.
"Who is your master?" he demanded to know.
The crowd of children stood in awkward silence. They hadn't the appreciation that their parents had of the headmaster's accomplishments—how things were now was all they had ever known in their relatively short lifetimes—but the nearly unanimous aggrandizement their relatives directed toward him was more than enough to leave them star-struck.
"My master?" Azriel wasn't expecting that line of questioning. "U-Um… I—"
The grizzled man closed his eyes and sighed, "Hmph— so it is as I thought. You really are quite foolish to put up such a display in front of so many onlookers. Don't you know the precariousness of your situation?"
Azriel was shocked to hear the headmaster say those words. He was confident the old man was alluding to him being a reincarnation and that he was apparently not doing a great job of hiding that fact.
Giving a frightening expression that provoked fear yet revealed no emotion, Azriel tensely whispered, "How many people here—?"
"—know what you are?" the headmaster finished Azriel's sentence with a sly grin before continuing, "I assure you, none… Well— except me, of course."
The headmaster swished his fingers, signaling Azriel to follow him, "Come along now. I would like to have a chat with you."
Azriel, uncertain whether or not to do as the man asked, first opened his mouth to ask a question but was once again quickly cut off by the master explaining, "No. Nothing bad will happen to you. I swear on my honor."
It was becoming opaquely clear that the old headmaster somehow knew the things Azriel was going to say before he himself did. It was like the man could read Azriel's thoughts, or at the very least, he was good at predicting them.
Before he was willing to go any further, Azriel needed to ask, "How do you know what—?"
"—No, I can't read your mind. What I'm doing is no more than a simple demonstration," the headmaster explained, turning back to face Azriel upon re-boarding the hovering contraption, "Let's not speak of it here, too many prying ears."
Azriel looked at the device with a bit of uncertainty. He wanted to question the contraption's apparent hazardousness, but as he opened his mouth, he was again cut off by the master, "The platform is completely safe."
Exhaling the latent breath caught in his throat into a discontent sigh, Azriel climbed atop the platform and stood against the railing, looking down at the growing space between him and the ground as the platform levitated up into the air.
Only mere seconds after it had taken off, Azriel witnessed the ground from an altitude he had never had before. He felt that, at this height, even if he had double-jumped just before hitting the ground, the momentum of downward force would completely mitigate the upward force the skill provided.
Azriel wasn't scared of heights by any means, but he found it interesting nonetheless. It wasn't an often occurrence for him to observe a possibility, a scenario, wherein his demise was as easy as a few steps, one where there would be no hope of escape, one he couldn't easily sidestep like every other that had come before it.
Azriel had been confident he had what it took to endure every disfavorable set of circumstances he had ever experienced, all except the one before him now. The one thing with no exerted will of its own, an intangible concept, a simple fact of science that was the only thing Azriel knew could kill him without a shred of doubt.
An opening formed in the roof of the tower, like two sliding doors retracting in unison. From there, the floating platform locked in place as it sunk beneath the hole with the precision of two magnets linked together.
Lowering until it slid into a large indentation in the floor tiles, a perfectly-sized gap between the shiny, smooth marble tiles, the platform leveled out with the ground leaving not even a millimeter height difference with the surrounding marble tiles.
"Thank you. You are dismissed," the headmaster stated as the Logos scribes controlling the contraption nodded and left his office post-haste.
Walking over to an armchair and sitting down in it, the headmaster called out to Azriel, "Come, sit."
Azriel scanned the room, noting its design to be heavily reminiscent of what he had seen in that place. The smooth white marble pillars and gold trimming seemed even closer to what he had remembered seeing in that place than the decorum at The Duke of Hilton's estate.
The wall by which the headmaster sat was covered in paintings of things Azriel couldn't make heads or tails of. Yet, for some reason, he couldn't help but stare at them as though they were trying to reveal something; what, he wasn't sure of.
Snapping his eyes away from the mesmerizing paintings, he warily took a seat across from the headmaster.
The headmaster sat mutely, looking at Azriel with a smile that faded in and out. Azriel thought the behavior odd but didn't mention it as he didn't have a good measure of behavior anyhow.
The headmaster's face started to turn grim, and after a minute passed, the headmaster finally spoke in a solemn tone, "I see. So you don't remember your previous world hence why my paintings mean nothing to you. That's a pity."
Azriel's body tensed up, and his fists clenched.
Somehow, the headmaster hadn't only discovered Azriel was a reincarnation but also that he was an amnesiac with no prior knowledge of his previous life. What's more, the codger mentioned something ominous about being from another world.
Azriel seethed, "Tell me… what… you know?"
The headmaster conceded, "Alright," making it seem like he would give Azriel the answers. However, no such resolutions were presented, and the headmaster resumed their staring match once again.
"What is this guy's problem?" Azriel frustratedly wondered to himself right as the headmaster nodded, looking as though he had come to some sort of understanding.
"You were in The Tutorial Zone for so long that you not only forgot everything about the world you came from, but you also lost the natural survival instincts that even babies have."
Azriel shot out of his chair, backflipping behind it and taking a fighting stance. The headmaster didn't seem phased or, in any way, surprised by this act, instead sighing, "Like I alluded to earlier, I'm demonstrating my skill to you, my reincarnation skill: Godly Precognition."
Azriel's eyes widened, and his hands dropped to his sides. "No way."
***
The third trial was reaching its conclusion out in the courtyard while Azriel sat inside the headmaster's office, a table between them. A tray with two teacups sat on it, one empty, the other untouched.
Azriel broke the silence after noting the demeanor change of the headmaster, "So— um…." He waited to see if the headmaster would cut him off again.
"Yes, what is it?" the headmaster inquired.
"Based on how you didn't seem to know what I was just about to say, you must've shut it off, right? That skill, I mean."
The headmaster smiled, "You are right that Godly Precognition isn't a passive skill, but it isn't sustained either. Also, while you are right in that I am no longer using it, even if I were still using it, I wouldn't have known what you were about to say. You stopped yourself from speaking, and I can't do anything about that."
Azriel became confused—not knowing the meaning of precognition—he had concluded the headmaster's skill gave him the ability to read people's minds.
"My skill of precognition—" the headmaster emphasized, "—gives me the ability to see several seconds into the future within an instant. It's an active ability, meaning I have to consciously activate it every time I want to use it."
Azriel looked observantly at the headmaster as the puzzle pieces fell in place.
He continued, "In my youthful days, I could see roughly twenty seconds into the future, but now I see nary ten." The headmaster shook his head with an almost remorseful look, "Somewhere in your twenties, you'll reach a point where your skills start to degrade along with your other faculties. You'll find it harder and harder to maintain a fit body, mind, and spirit. Growing them, well it won't even be on the table."
Azriel momentarily fazed out of the conversation after realizing how the headmaster had figured out everything he had without uttering a word. It was so simple that he felt stupid for not seeing it till now.
Because the headmaster could see the future, all he had to do was think about asking a question, then activate the skill, witness himself asking it in the future, and once he got his answer, he could move on to the next question and repeat the process without having to open his mouth a single time. Essentially, he could learn everything he wanted to know about a person without them having a single clue he had done it.
"That is the reason for why I have started these schools to begin with," he explained, "Providing education is a wonderful goal, don't get me wrong… but it's not my priority; it never has been."
Azriel refocused on the conversation listening intently as the headmaster declared, "I'm not worried about educating the next generation. No, no, no. I built these schools for one purpose. I built these schools to find you."
A moment of uncomfortable stillness passed before Azriel asked with a burgeoning tenseness, "You built them to find me?"
"Mm— no, not quite. Rather, I built it to find people like you, other reincarnation, all reincarnations, you included."
Azriel awkwardly scratched the back of his neck, simply asking, "But isn't it bad to be a reincarnation? Why would someone risk outing themselves as one?"
"What?" the headmaster furrowed his brow with a look of incredulity before cackling, "I suppose you would be the only one who wouldn't know, huh?"
"What is that supposed to mean—?"
"We went to high school together, all of us."