A little girl was watching her cousins play with her dad. They were trying to force him to defend their attacks, rather than just dodge out of the way. Three mages and two strikers constantly harassed him, to no avail. A couple timeline-crossing attacks got close, requiring him to actually transmit away, but he never once blocked or redirected an attack.
Suddenly, her dad perked up and moved too fast for her to see, creating a massive flash of light that nearly blinded her. When she regained her sight, she saw her dad, with his arm missing from the elbow down. He looked at her and sighed in relief. There was an odd white string coming out from the space behind him.
Her cousins were still recovering from being much closer to the flash than she was when her dad said, "We're done. Whoever shot that arrow wins, but if you ever use my daughter as collateral to prevent me from dodging again, you won't get a third chance."
Mykil began walking over to his 2 year old daughter, Lroni, as she followed the thread to her feet. Attached to it was an arrow the most beautiful shade of green she'd ever seen. And it was the first attack she'd ever seen manage to actually hurt her dad. When both her selves got picked up, with her dad having healed his missing arm, they simultaneously said, "I wanna be da bes arroo sooter."
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An arrow lodged itself in the bullseye of a target, surrounded by pale rocks. "Too slow," he said.
"What do you mean too slow? All you said was to hit the target! Plus, I already portaled it up there," Lroni said, pointing at the further moon. "How was that too slow?"
"Enemies won't give you time to setup a portal," her dad said in a tone she was learning to hate, "and even if you somehow set one up, they would have been able to attack you through the portal with deadly force in the time it took you to close it. Transmitting is used by almost everyone for a reason, so use it. The only things that can stop it are wards, which are only used by the strongest people due to their prohibitive power cost."
"Transmitting stops movement. You taught me that. It wouldn't help with archery."
"Yes, but you don't have to transmit just the arrow, do you? Think about it for a second."
She did. Well, she tried, but it was distracting to be learning 14 different lessons at once. Her dad conjured a clock and stared at it until she finally responded, "Wouldn't a ranged person in melee range be really bad? I guess with enough speed wacca, I could shoot an arrow fast enough to transmit away before they could attack me, but I don't have enough power to do that while also putting enough sharp wacca on the arrow to do damage to anything that matters."
Disappearing the clock, her dad said, "You don't need to have the power to do so now. All you need to do is show you're thinking about such things. You're not going to be the best at this over night. You're already 6 selves above average for your age, that, combined with demonstrating good battle tactics, should be good enough to get you in. Come on, let's practice what you just said. Hit the shaft of your last arrow, using that technique.
"Transmit in, apply speed and sharpness, shoot, and transmit out. I'm certain you'll impress the judges if you can do that 5 times in a row in under 5 microseconds."
She knocked an arrow and pulled back before saying, "I don't want to impress them. I want to rank first." She then disappeared from her living room and appeared next to the arrow she shot into the moon previously, imagined the required wacca shapes for speed along the arrow's shaft and sharpness on its tip and released the bow before transmitting back.
"Good, you hit- ok, break time," he said, when he noticed the tips of her fingers having blackened. He transmitted over and grabbed her hand. It glowed a slight blue as the black slowly receded.
"I can still go longer," Lroni said.
"Sure, if you want to lose your arms. It'd be too expensive to get a good enough healer to fix significant wacca poisoning before the exam, and you're still 20 selves away from being able to heal minor damage to a single body like this without spending too much time."
"I have 14," she said.
Her dad waved her off and said, "Fine, 16. Whatever. You get my point, though. When I heal this in an hour, retract from this timeline. We definitely don't want cross-self poisoning. Not when the exam is in 10 hours."
Her heart sank and she said, "What? I need every advantage I can get if I'm going to rank first! I need to continue training at full power!"
"No, if you continue training here, you'll risk poisoning yourself during the exam. It would be a very hard sell to get you in if they saw you do that in the stressful situation of the exam, let alone a peaceful training session. You should have told me this self was getting close to its limit, we could have taken it slower and this wouldn't even be an issue."
She groaned out a, "Fine."
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Lroni ran through a planet-spanning obstacle course set up by her father.
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Simultaneously, she was being taught how to shoot a bow from one side of a planet to another with subatomic accuracy, working on upping her maximum energy output, learning the best way to switch which timelines her bodies were in, increasing her resistance to wacca poisoning, being healed by one of her father's selves, and 8 other things.
At the rate she's growing, she'll obliterate the archery exam record, maybe even set a new record for the whole exam, Mykil thought. Though, her growth is still a little slow for someone with 14 selves. It's like she hit a plateau at 9 selves, and hasn't been learning any faster than she was then. I don't think we'll have enough time to properly address that before the exam.
"Ok," he said to his daughters, specifically the one that was learning how to fight under heavy wards, preventing most wacca usage, making her rely purely on matter conjuration, "we're taking a break from fighting while suppressed. It doesn't appear during the entrance exam, anyway. 3 of you are taking a break."
"What, why? Can we really afford 3 doing nothing?"
"Yes. You're not learning at the right speed for how many selves you have. It's like you have 5 less selves than you actually do, and this hasn't always been the case. A maximum learning rate of 9 selves is actually pretty good for your age. You need to dedicate a few selves to simply processing the information. If you have 3 selves doing nothing but existing, you should have another self that can actively learn.
"This is 2 to 1 if you have those two actively processing the information. There are some more power-intensive solutions to hitting your learning limit, but it'll be a few months, maybe a year, before you can do those. For now, just rest with this self, the one on accuracy training, and the one learning to make wards. Still dismiss the one I'm healing once it's healed.
"We don't really have time to figure out the best method of active processing for you, so just rest with those three selves. Overall, this will be an increase your learning speed a bit. You might even come close to breaking the archery exam's record."
She complied while complaining, "But I want to break the all-time record, and Hyedon has 28 selves! He's going to beat me super hard."
"No, he's not," Mykil said. "His maximum amount of selves to properly learn is 3. He's got power, but he takes forever to learn how to use it. Even if he found the perfect active processing method for him, he's got one more self than you that's able to learn properly. I doubt that little idiot was able to do so, though. He's probably only got an effective learning rate of 9 selves, which you've had for over 3 months now, before we even started actively training.
"Plus, he's going into the most harshly scored exam, while you're going into the easiest. I doubt he even passes his exam this year. Maybe next year. The only way I see him getting in is if he or his parents bribed the examiners. The only saving grace of his is that he'll be almost impossible to kill due to how many selves he has, which while useful for the role he's applying for, is far from the only thing you need to pass the defender exam."
"Fine. What should we do, instead, then?"
"Go take a nap, hang out with friends, take a bath, swim in a star, whatever, as long as it isn't too novel an experience."
"Think I'm a little too weak to swim in a star."
"Oh yeah. You get what I meant, though."
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The three Lronis on break appeared in a backyard. Specifically, that of Zhern, a kid from a couple solar systems over that was also getting trained by her dad. In one timeline, Mykil punched Zhern straight on, sending out a blast that carved a straight, expanding path through the planet, and part of the moon. Zhern only mooved back a couple feet from the impact.
Mykil winced and said, "Woops, I keep forgetting you still don't have deflection down. Don't tell your parents about this," as he rapidly reformed the landscape and moon as it was. He noticed his daughter half way through. "Oh, hey kid. Zhern's taking breaks in timelines 7,3, 7,4, and 8,1."
She nodded and disappeared from the timelines she was in Zhern's backyard, reappearing in the specified timelines, the numbers corresponding to how many timelines in each direction to go from the current one. Zhern almost immediately also appeared. His 5' height towered over her 3'9" height. "Why did you get my dad to make you a defender? You've been punching harder than what I just saw you take for years, you'd have made a great striker."
"I don't like hurting things," Zhern said. "So, I assume you're also on break duty. What are we doing today?"
"Dad said to not do anything to new. We could watch reruns of old arena fights we've already watched."
"No thanks, your dad has me watching those to analyze their attacks, and how to best defend myself and others from them. I don't want to see another arena fight for another day or two, but I know he's going to keep me watching them, at least until the exam."
"We could go do something fitting for our age for once."
"Ha! Good one. We both know we'd get bored of stuff made for normal 7 years olds in milliseconds."
"Good point. Any weird locations you've scouted out for the usual?"
"A couple, but your dad says we shouldn't do anything too new, right? We could just go back to that place with the really cool river. It's been a while since we went there."
"Oh, yeah. We never did build that dam. Yeah, let's go do that. No creation, no external speed wacca, just physical labor as we make the dam for real this time?" Lroni asked before she transmitted to the target planet.
Zhern transmitted to feet from Lroni. An over 500-foot wide river ran through open plains, cutting out a deep valley in the otherwise flat landscape. "Let's get to it, then."
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Lroni's poisoned body was finally fully healed, so they dismissed it. While she'd not always agreed with her dad's choices, she knew he was almost always right, at least when it comes to training. In the time it took for the healing to occur, she and Zhern managed to lay out the framework for the dam. As they were half way through collecting enough mud for the first section, Lroni's dad appeared.
"Next surge is going to happen in 6 and a half hours. I think it'll be a good learning opportunity, if not as efficient as your current training. Want to go check it out?"
"Heck yeah," Zhern said.
"Not if it'll lower my chances of setting a new exam record," Lroni said.
Zhern deflated as he said, "Awww."
"I never said you can't go," Lroni responded.
After a few moments of silence, her dad said, "Just because he can go without you doesn't mean he wants to."
"I'm not being guilted into going to something I'd rather not. Again. We just recently went to play light tag. I'm better at dodging attacks without transmitting from that trip, but I lost 3 hours of archery training for that."
"You also gained your 14th self there," her dad added.
"You know that was because I left one self behind to continue working on my wacca density. I guess I can spare one of my break selves, if it makes Zhern actually do something he wants to. Just don't lower my training speed by trying to teach me while I'm there."