Zhern was having a great time. Lroni's dad was letting him take a full break from training to go participate in fending off the most recent monster surge. He was still only a kid, so he only participated in fighting meteor-eaters with other kids who were brought along while the adults dealt with the planet-eater and stronger enemies.

While he couldn't be too close, he was able to watch people transmitting around, blowing monsters up from hundreds of miles away. There were even some attacks he hadn't seen before. It was kind of annoying to him how his first thought was to figure out how to properly block and stop said attacks, but he did accept how good of a learning opportunity it was.

A horse-sized hexapod snapped its 3-foot-long jaw down on one of Zhern's group's strikers, and he transmitted over between its jaws, holding it open for the much smaller kid, who threw their javelin straight down its throat. It lodged in its absurdly strong scales on the other side of its body before reappearing in the kid's hand.

He watched Lroni's dad transmit in front of this surge's commander, a moon-sized, centaur-like creature with a miniature sun for a head, and blast it through the nearest star. It came out the other side bloodied and burned before grabbing toward what was empty space, right where Mykil transmitted to. Its grip was strong, but unable to so much as hurt him as he reached up and shoved his arm into its palm.

He released a blast of wacca that traveled up its arm, exploding it into gore and attempting to do the same thing to its torso before it transmitted to the nearest planet in every timeline Zhern could see, put its hand on it, and enveloped it in a substance that seemed to eat light itself. The planet disappeared almost instantly as the monster was restored in some way by this action. Probably turning the planet to wacca and using that to replace its broken parts, Zhern thought.

Lroni's dad appeared behind its head and smashed it like a watermelon before punching the body out of the solar system. As it transmitted away, he followed right behind it and turned its chest to bloody pulp with a hurricane of speed wacca. More people surrounded it in a sphere, and Zhern lost sight of the commander as their bodies blocked his line of sight, rapidly deploying wards to keep the commander pinned in place.

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Lroni was having a great time. She had learned so much about archery on a timeline hopper level. Proper scouting, proper technique, shooting across timelines, rapid shooting, accurate shooting, multishooting, shooting using just wacca, and conjuring her bow and arrows. Additionally, she was close to making her 15th self, though it was going to come after the exam, and should have made decent progress toward becoming near-immune to wacca poisoning. It's hard to test that last one without large amounts of healing afterward.

And now, she was spending the rest of the time alternating between long range shooting, increasing shot power, and increasing arrow speed across her many bodies, alongside the normal wacca density and poisoning resistance training. With just under 2 hours left until the exam, she was focusing primarily on what would increase her score on the practical portion of the archery exam.

She would have to spend the last hour letting the wacca poisoning slowly built up during this process dissipate, but for now, she was enjoying the process of increasing her skill at archery, even if she was already close to the best that was physically possible given her wacca density and poison resistance.

She could already hit a meteor from over a light year away without using portals, transmitting, or any other form of teleportation, though the shot would still take a little over a minute to reach the target. Accounting for all the gravity sources along the way was the hardest part for Lroni. At the speeds her arrows traveled, they didn't individually matter much, but all put together, they could.

It made a really cool visual effect when she looked at it with mundane sight, too.

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"This is it, kid," Lroni's dad said as they appeared in front of a desk that had a woman with pitch-black hair behind it. They'd spent the last few minutes switching timelines to make it to the school, as it was a few million timelines outside their original 31415. Moving here was not as simple as willing herself into this timeline, manifesting her body, and transmitting here.

They'd had to actually transmit between timelines, one at a time. It was interesting to Lroni to see what changes, if any, were visibly present between the various timelines. Across her origin, there was very little difference, almost none of which was visible. A single photon with slightly different polarization, usually. Sometimes a whole quark moving to a different place, or a photon of hawking radiation appearing at a different spot on a black hole's surface.

Being so far from her origin had allowed those changes to add up, with the end result being still mostly identical, but with a couple locations she frequented moved by a full inch, having been hit by more photons and/or by more random variation in subatomic movements than others. In a society of people capable of crossing the boundaries between timelines, important things tended to either be in exactly the same places across all those timelines or intentionally completely different.

Lroni nodded and said, "So, what do we need to do?"

Her dad tilted his head at the woman behind the desk, while keeping his chin in her general direction.

She walked up to the desk and said, "I'm here to become an archer."

"Through the door to your left. Occupy as many timelines right next to each other as possible, and an instructor will be with you shortly."

Lroni and her dad nodded at the woman and made their way through the door. They were greeted by a large, open, dirt field, and Lroni manifested in 14 contiguous timelines. They had to wait two entire seconds, roughly the equivalent of 10 minutes for time-bound folk at Lroni's advancement, before someone appeared. They were a relatively small man, 5'8" tall with noodle arms and legs.

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However, they looked ancient, in a world where the ravages of time only begin to take their toll after thousands of years. After looking their way, he looked shocked for a moment before going back to neutral. "First, we'll test mundane archery skill. Without manipulating wacca outside your body, hit the iron atoms in these targets 3 times each in 5 shots," he said while conjuring one target for each timeline Lroni stood in. "If you succeed with the smallest, they'll be replaced with targets with even less iron and you'll go again."

Each target was 100 feet away, 3 feet in diameter, and were mostly made of aluminum. The first target had a circle of iron 1 foot across, with each one halving the size of the iron circle. Lroni conjured her bow, knocked an arrow, pulled its string back, barely aimed, and shot, hitting all 14 targets. The arrows flew and pierced right in the center of each circle.

Those arrows disappeared as she took another shot in each timeline. She hit the exact same spot, followed by a third shot, leaving a sizable cut in the iron of the targets. They were replaced with targets that had further halvings from the previous smallest target, the smallest of which was now but 2 atoms.

For the largest 4, she effortlessly hit all 3 shots. From there, she actually needed to aim for a noticeable amount of time, calming herself and aiming for a full tenth of a second on the smallest between each shot, using speed wacca inside her limbs to make microscopic movements that her muscles were incapable of. She winced when she failed to properly account for the wiggling of the arrow mid-flight and her second shot only barely clipped the leftmost iron atom, but didn't let it get to her head.

"Hm. Alright, well, just keep shooting these next ones until you miss, then. We don't have a good, way to measure mundane accuracy smaller than an atom," the old man said as he conjured targets with a single atom of iron.

Lroni took a calming breath across every timeline before her first shot. She thought of that green arrow that managed to hurt her dad as she pulled back her bow string. Between shots, she took an entire fifth of a second to make sure she was aimed properly. The first volley flew and landed right on target. On the second, one arrow only hit right before it stopped sinking into the aluminum. After a long, calming break, the third was all on-target. On the fourth, one shot missed by 61 picometers.

To his credit, the old man kept his cool and dematerialized the targets while moving on to the next test. "Next, we will begin the timeline-hopper-relevant tests. What kind of archer would you prefer to be? Piercers are great at dealing with large groups, artillery is great at dealing with heavily armored targets, sharpshooters are great at dealing with targets that are solar systems away, and skirmishers are a mix between striker and archer."

"I want to be an archer," Lroni said.

The old man slightly squinted at her.

"I don't want to be any of those things. They focus too much. I want to be the best archer in existence. Leaving any aspect of archery behind is unacceptable."

The old man sighed as, under his breath, he muttered, "Not another one." Then, normally, he said, "Alright, this will take a while, then. We'll go in the order I mentioned them, then. How good are you on wacca poisoning in each body?"

Lroni replied with various answers between 3% and 8%, with a maximum of 577kT.

The old man raised his eyebrows, failed to not smile a bit, and let out a very stifled laugh as he shook his head. "I'll conjure 100 targets, starting 50 feet ahead of you, each one foot further away. They will stay in their sphere around you as they try to dodge your arrows. Hit as many as you can in one second using a single arrow. If you hit all 100, a new set will appear with higher speed."

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"Mykil, you've really raised a monster," Frank said in a timeline that Lroni was not in. "I definitely wouldn't want to be on her bad side in a few years."

"She said she wanted to be the best archer. Even after all these years, she hasn't lost that drive. Who am I to deny her?"

"I also hear that other kid - Zhern? - you helped train is also doing well. Maybe even set a new record on entrance durability. Lroni here will definitely get perfect marks, assuming she keeps up her performance, and is set to completely decimate every archery record on this entrance exam. You would have made an excellent instructor."

"I've told you more times per timeline than Lroni's shot arrows, my place is on the battlefield. How many parents died because I wasn't there to kill the monsters that took their lives?"

Frank just tightened his lips and shook his head. He knew further attempts to get Mykil to become an instructor would be useless, so he wouldn't try. Not when he was still mourning his wife.

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One of Zhern grunted as he took a punch to the head. The head was the hardest place to defend, thanks to the squishy brain that can cause a body to become unusable if hit too hard. Knowing when to properly de-manifest a body to avoid this was important. It was preferable for a body to die than have a concussion mid-battle.

He didn't even really want to be here, but did enjoy watching others taking their tests. He just didn't want to be left behind by Lroni. Being in combat wasn't fun. Watching combat was, even if it was just defenders getting beaten up for their exam. Another blow landed on his chest. It didn't cause him to move one atom, so he just kept watching his fellow future defenders. Some were even having trouble with the same level of power that he just got hit with.

"Can we just skip to actually damaging punches?" Zhern asked. "I feel like we'll be in durability forever if we don't. Or maybe just aim for my head a bunch. Either way gets this over with more quickly."

"Alright, kiddo," the woman hitting him for the last couple seconds said, "how hard do you think you can take?"

Zhern thought a bit before saying, "About this hard." He punched the ground and a neat, clean, cone of rock turned to dust beneath his fist, blasting a few bits out the other side of the planet the exam grounds were on. A few cracks formed around the impact site and a couple people looked over, only to be bean upside the head and knocked out. The planet was rapidly restored to normal before the pressurized magma below could spew out either hole.

His examiner looked confused and said, "You sure you don't want to be a striker?"

"Yeah, I don't like hurting things."

"You can be both a defender and a striker."

"No, I specifically said I don't want to be a striker. I don't like hurting things. Being a striker involves hurting many things."

She shrugged and punched him in the stomach with the same force he did the ground. He moved a quarter inch. She doubled that force in a second punch, sending Zhern flying exactly 20 feet back, tearing the skin of his stomach slightly and causing him to bleed. "You underestimated yourself," she said.

Zhern shrugged and conjured bandages over the wound. "I guess. On to deflection?"

"Not yet. You were damaged, but that wasn't what we were testing." She punched another one of him in the head just as hard, and he definitely got a concussion. That body notified her of that and de-manifested before other bodies were hit with 20%, 30%, 40%, and 50% further increased force. Each one sustained worse and worse injuries, with the one taking the largest impact finally ending the durability portion of the exam by getting split in half.

"Now onto deflection. How strong a hit do you think you can deflect?"

"Nowhere near as big of one as I can take straight on. I know that won't always be enough, though."