The target looked as if somebody had tested a shotgun on it.
Marco stood fifteen yards away and tried to find a charitable pattern in the holes. Three arrows had landed in the outer white ring. Two sat low in the blue. One had missed the paper and entered the foam at a distance from the others that suggested personal disagreement.
He drew a circle around the whole group with his finger.
“That counts,” he said.
The older man in the next lane glanced over, decided Marco was speaking to himself, and moved his gear farther away.
It was Tuesday evening, the day after Ms. Pritchard’s lesson. The county range charged forty-eight dollars for a month of weekday access, a price low enough to seem reasonable until Marco added fuel, target faces, and the two hundred twenty-six dollars already spent on the bow.
He paid at the kiosk.
Emma’s sheet would have opinions.
Marco clipped up a fresh target and set a timer for forty minutes. He had worked an ordinary Zone 0 shift that day: shell bins, two sealed field-pack pallets for the surface lift, one hour helping maintenance clear a clogged drain. His shoulders felt used but not exhausted. He wanted to learn what practice after work actually looked like.
The first end went better than the previous afternoon. All six arrows hit paper.
On the third draw, the release found the corner of his jaw without the small correction his hand had needed yesterday. His back held tension through the shot. The arrow still landed in white.
The second went worse. By the fourth shot, the pin wandered faster. Marco held longer, waiting for it to settle. His shoulder rose. His release hand jerked.
The arrow struck six inches low.
He let the bow down on the next draw rather than force it. That felt like quitting even though Ms. Pritchard had specifically told him to do it when the shot broke down.
Rest. Breathe. Try again.
His best arrow of the evening landed at the edge of the red center. It arrived immediately after his worst miss and taught him almost nothing.
That was the frustrating part. A good result could come from a bad shot. A bad result could follow something that felt clean. At fifteen yards, the target recorded where the arrow went, not why.
Marco began noting each shot in the margin.
Rushed. Held too long. Lost anchor. Clean?
By the end of forty minutes, the question mark appeared more often than any other mark.
He stopped on time. The last six arrows were drifting low as his back tired, and continuing would only teach his body to collapse more efficiently.
On the drive home, every stoplight seemed to last long enough for his shoulders to stiffen.
Sarah was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the clinic’s insurance portal open on her tablet. Marco carried the bow case through the room toward the shed.
“How many monsters?” she asked.
“One paper circle. It was aggressive.”
“Good. I defeated one too.”
She turned the tablet toward him.
The maintenance classification had been reversed. Eleven months of prior authorization, the clinic letter, and Sarah's appeal log had forced the insurer to reprocess the treatment. A green adjustment removed nine hundred twenty dollars from the family balance.
It did not place money in their account. It erased money they had been expected to produce. The clinic's required monthly payment fell by eighty-five dollars.
Sarah opened the household sheet and moved next month's eighty-five from CLINIC HOLD to TRUCK REPAIR.
“You won,” Marco said.
“They corrected a bill after I made it more expensive to ignore me.” She closed the portal. “How was the bow?”
“I can miss consistently at fifteen yards.”
“Consistency is important.”
“Emma has infected you.”
He put the case away, then entered the range fee into the sheet before he could decide it belonged in a later week.
Thursday’s rain pushed everyone under the covered firing line.
Water rattled on the corrugated roof and ran in silver sheets beyond the targets. The air smelled of wet grass, foam, and bowstring wax. Marco chose a lane near the end so fewer people could watch him retrieve arrows from embarrassing places.
He had completed two careful ends when a hard case clicked open behind him.
“You lowered the draw weight.”
Marco recognized Ethan before he turned. “Ms. Pritchard lowered it.”
“She did mine too.”
Ethan set a sleek compound bow on the rack. It was not gaudy. The dark limbs, compact cams, and clean sight assembly looked expensive in the way professional tools often did: every unnecessary thing had been removed.
“That sponsor gear?” Marco asked.
“Loaner. If I leave the program, it goes back.”
“Still beats my arrangement.”
“My arrangement comes with biometric reports.”
Ethan tapped the sensor clipped below his grip. Marco’s bow possessed no component capable of reporting on him. He found that comforting.
They shot in adjacent lanes. Ethan moved his target to thirty yards.
Marco tried not to watch. This lasted until Ethan’s first three arrows landed close enough to cover with a coffee mug.
“How long have you been using a bow?” Marco asked.
“Nine days.”
Marco looked at his own target.
Ethan followed his gaze. “I have a ranged-weapons aptitude.”
“B?”
“A.”
“Of course you do.”
The words came out flatter than Marco intended. Ethan rested his bow against the rack.
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“That sounded like I was showing off.”
“You answered the question.”
Ethan nodded, not quite relieved. He had been careful around Marco since the Awakening, as if kindness itself might become insulting if applied too thickly. Marco appreciated the effort and sometimes resented needing it.
“Coach changed my breathing yesterday,” Ethan said. “It helped.”
“I currently have several kinds of breathing.”
“You hold it.”
Marco frowned. “I breathe.”
“Until you anchor. Then you stop and wait for the pin.”
“You watched two shots.”
“Both times.”
That was irritating enough to be useful.
Ethan demonstrated without drawing. “Breathe while you set. Easy exhale into the anchor. Don’t empty out. Just let the pressure drop, then keep pulling through the release.”
“Your coach charge by the word?”
“By the hour. ADR prefers suffering in longer blocks.”
Marco nocked an arrow. He breathed through the draw, let some air out as the string found his jaw, and tried not to freeze around the sight pin.
The release surprised him.
The arrow landed in the blue, left of center. Not a great shot. Cleaner than the one before it.
“Again,” Ethan said.
“You charge by the hour?”
“I have six minutes before my coach asks why my heart rate is low.”
The next arrow went high. The third clipped red.
The cue did not make Marco talented. It removed one mistake, which was cheaper and more believable.
Ethan’s wrist display chimed. He grimaced.
“Caroline?”
“Worse. Interval block.”
He moved to the thirty-yard line and began shooting on a timed cadence that Marco could not have maintained at fifteen. His groups widened under pressure, but widened from excellent to merely good.
Marco returned to his own target.
The comparison hurt. It also clarified the work. Ethan’s starting point did not change Marco’s next arrow.
Exhale. Anchor. Keep moving.
The shot landed two inches from the one before it.
By the following Monday, Marco had learned that a forty-hour workweek could ruin a training plan without asking permission.
The shift ran long after a coolant alarm shut down one of the shell crushers. Marco spent the final two hours carrying sealed totes around the affected line. The weight was manageable. The repeated turns were not. His lower back felt tight by clock-out, and the muscles behind his shoulders had the dull heaviness of wet rope.
He drove to the range anyway.
The first draw told him it was a bad idea.
His bow shoulder shook before he reached the wall. Marco let down, waited, and tried again. The second attempt reached anchor, but his sight picture bounced over the entire target.
He could have shot. The backstop was large. An arrow landing somewhere in the foam would still count as practice if he used a generous definition.
Instead, he set the bow on the rack.
It took him three minutes to admit the session was over.
He used the remaining daylight to inspect the arrows, wax the string, and practice his stance without drawing. None of it moved Foundation in a way he could see.
The next morning, his shoulders felt normal.
Wednesday’s session was his best yet.
He shot three-arrow ends instead of six. The shorter sets made it easier to identify when his form changed. He marked rushed shots and clean shots, then compared them at the target. Results still wandered, but the clean shots had begun to form a rough hand-sized group.
On the fourth end, the string struck his inner forearm.
Pain snapped through the muscle. The arrow hit the target sideways and bounced into the grass.
Marco swore and lowered the bow.
A purple welt rose beneath his sleeve. His grip had rotated inward as he tired, putting his arm in the string’s path.
He found the arrow near the drainage ditch. It looked intact until he rolled it on the inspection table. The tip traced a slow circle.
Bent.
Marco tagged it with red tape and put it in the broken-gear pocket. Ten usable practice arrows remained.
Seven dollars was not a disaster. It was enough to make the mistake memorable.
He stopped for the day.
At home, Marco laid the bent arrow beside the two shafts Ms. Pritchard had condemned. Three pieces of carbon now occupied the corner of the workbench without being useful enough to shoot or worthless enough to throw away.
Emma stood in the shed doorway holding the notebook.
“You said eleven arrows.”
“Now it’s ten.”
“What happened?”
“Forearm entered a disagreement with the string.”
He showed her the bruise. She winced, then wrote one arrow: $7 beneath the month’s range fee.
“You can stop looking pleased,” Marco said.
“I’m not pleased. It’s just good data.”
“You’re becoming dangerous.”
Emma flipped to the target photographs. Marco had taken one after each session. The first looked chaotic. Later targets remained ugly, but the worst holes had drawn inward from the edges.
She set the images side by side on his phone. “This one is better.”
“I shot worse that day.”
“How?”
“More misses felt clean.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Correct.”
He picked up the bow without an arrow and faced the blank shed wall. There was not enough room to draw safely, so he practiced only setting his feet and bringing his bow hand up. Emma watched him repeat the movement.
“Your shoulder changes,” she said.
Marco stopped. “When?”
“After a few. It gets closer to your ear.”
He repeated the lift while watching his reflection in the dark window. On the fifth repetition, fatigue pulled his shoulder upward almost imperceptibly.
“That’s what Ms. Pritchard keeps correcting.”
“I should charge.”
“You want the bent arrow?”
“No.”
Sarah called them in for dinner before Marco could turn observation into another hour of pointless repetition. At the table, she saw the bruise immediately.
“Paper circle fight back?”
“String caught me.”
“Clinic?”
“No swelling past the forearm, normal grip, normal movement.”
Sarah looked at him until he realized he had recited the workplace self-check.
“It’s a bruise,” he said.
“That was available as an answer.”
She did not tell him to stop. She did make him hold a bag of frozen peas against it while they ate, which Lucy found funny enough to require several explanations of why.
The next afternoon, Marco left the bow in its case.
Resting still felt like an absence in the notebook. He was beginning to understand it was an entry anyway.
Ray noticed the bruise in the Zone 0 break room on Thursday.
“String?”
Marco looked down at the purple line. “Door.”
“Your doors have serving wax?”
Wes leaned across the table. “Luxury home.”
Marco gave up. “Grip collapsed.”
Ray took a drink of coffee. “Good.”
“The bruise?”
“The part where you know why.”
Dana entered with a tablet under one arm. “Mercer says you want controlled pest authorization.”
Marco sat straighter. “Eventually.”
“Eventually is not a date.”
“When I can pass the grouping.”
“Tomorrow, fifteen hundred. West practice bay. Employer arrows stay locked until you pass. You use your own bow.”
Marco glanced at Ray. “You set that up?”
“I mentioned you were spending money voluntarily. Dana wanted to document the symptom.”
Dana handed him the digital authorization form. The standards were modest and specific: twelve arrows at fifteen yards; ten on a twenty-inch target; no unsafe draws; correct response to a cease-fire signal; safe equipment inspection before and after.
Passing would grant only employer permission to shoot G-grade pests under supervision in a controlled lane.
Marco signed.
Ray did not wait for the assessment to start teaching the parts Marco had not practiced outdoors.
They spent the last half hour of Thursday’s shift in an empty controlled lane while the bow remained locked in Marco’s locker. Yellow floor paint marked the firing line. A red stripe crossed the lane ten feet ahead, beyond which only pest-control staff could move while the bay was active. The sidewalls were layered rubber over mana-dampening mesh. At the far end, a steel funnel guided beetles toward a bait box in front of the backstop.
“Paper doesn’t smell you,” Ray said. “Beetles do, a little. Crawlers do a lot. Rats hear the bow.”
He walked Marco through the lane sequence. Confirm Control had isolated the gallery. Check the bait box. Inspect the backstop for exposed steel. Count arrows before entering and after leaving. Never step past red until the lane indicator went dark and Control confirmed it over radio.
“What if an arrow goes through the target chute?” Marco asked.
“You report it. You don’t climb after fourteen dollars while the lane is live.”
“I don’t own fourteen-dollar arrows yet.”
“You will. Then you’ll understand why people make stupid choices over them.”
At the equipment cage, Ray showed him a damaged dungeon-rated shaft that had split along its conductive weave. The front eight inches were peeled into black slivers.
“Shooter found a crack before nocking,” Ray said. “This is what a good day looks like.”
Marco turned the shaft under the light without touching the splinters.
“Imprinting reinforce it enough to prevent that?”
“Imprinting helps it hit a dungeon creature. It does not forgive damage. Your mana follows what your hands operate. Bow, string, shaft for a moment. At your current mana and skill, it’s a thin coat. Don’t expect to feel clever.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Depends who you ask. Pressure. Warmth. Nothing. First time I noticed mine, somebody had already told me what I was supposed to feel, so I don’t trust the memory.”
That answer sounded more useful than certainty.
Ray set the split shaft back in its training mount.
“Tomorrow isn’t a monster test. It’s whether I can stand behind you without wondering when you’ll turn around with an arrow nocked.”
“Comforting standard.”
“You’d be surprised.”
At three the next afternoon, the West practice bay smelled of rubber backstop and disinfectant. Dana stood behind the yellow observation line. Ray checked the bow and made Marco check it again.
“What happens if you miss?” Ray asked.
“Arrow hits the rated backstop.”
“What happens if a person crosses the red line?”
“Let down. Do not shoot.”
“What if the target is moving?”
“It isn’t today.”
“Answer.”
“I wait for a safe shot.”
Ray stepped back.
Marco nocked the first arrow.
His hands felt less steady than they did at the county range. Dana’s tablet recorded each shot. The authorization mattered. That was enough pressure to bring back old mistakes.
He breathed into the anchor.
The first arrow landed low in the white. The second reached blue. The third went high but stayed on paper.
At the sixth shot, a worker opened the outer bay door despite the red warning light. The door buzzer sounded.
Marco let down before Ray called cease-fire.
The worker apologized and backed out. Dana made a note.
Marco reset.
Ten of twelve arrows struck the scoring face. His group remained broad. No one mistook it for talent.
Dana reviewed the target, then the safety log.
“Minimum grouping,” she said.
Marco waited.
She added her signature to the form.
“Monitored pest assignments only. Ray or another authorized lead present. No independent weapon carry in Zone 1. You miss one command and the authorization is suspended.”
“Understood.”
“Congratulations. You are now approved to shoot things less dangerous than the paperwork.”
The signed form appeared in Marco’s employee profile before he reached the locker room.
He sent a screenshot to Sarah with the words monitored pest work, supervisor required before the phrase weapons authorization could reach home on its own and acquire teeth. Her reply came while he was locking the bow case.
I can read the restrictions. Keep reading them too.
Emma sent a second message moments later.
10/12. Minimum passing is still passing.
Marco looked at the broad group on Dana’s attached assessment photo. Nobody would mistake it for a hidden gift. The value lay in the two arrows he had not fired: one let down when the sight broke down, one held when the door buzzer sounded.
It was a small permission, hedged by rules and supervision.
It was also a line he had not been allowed to cross the week before.