(Male lead's POV)
I knocked down two more men, leaving sixteen. This time, I had no intention of running away yet. I pretended to flee while letting them close in on me so they would not realize what I was planning. Five of them followed close behind me, while the others tried to surround me and block my escape.
I let the distance between us shrink to twenty meters. At that moment, I cast Sambrar (Fog Cloud) and threw two smoke bombs at the same time, so they would think the fog came from the bombs.
As a twenty-meter-long smokescreen surrounded me, I immediately changed position and began running toward those five knights, firing arrows at them one after another. I fired five arrows, but only three hit because their movements were so erratic. After all, they had been blinded.
I decided not to waste any more arrows and crept toward the remaining two. I came up behind one knight and struck his right leg from behind with my sword. He cried out in pain, and the instant he dropped to one knee, I swiftly struck his neck with my sword's pommel, knocking him unconscious.
The other man in the fog heard his friend's cry of pain and hurried toward the sound, but I had already vanished into the fog. The flanking knights saw that their plan had backfired and began charging into the fog, but they were still at least twenty meters away, and I had already finished the job.
Not wanting to linger, I prepared a ball of earth half the size of a fist and shot it through the thick fog at the last knight's helmet. When the stone struck the helmet, there was a loud clang, and the knight grunted and fell to the ground.
By the time the remaining knights arrived, I had already run twenty meters away and disappeared into the bushes, but I could sense people about ten meters away. They had to be Lord Stark and Ser Rodrik's group, and I kept running toward them without hesitation.
(Eddard Stark's POV)
We were about twenty or thirty meters from the fighting, and from our elevated position, we could clearly see what was happening until the smoke bombs exploded. But what I saw was not a battle. It was a one-sided slaughter. Aermir hunted down my knights one after another as though he were hunting ducks.
Then I saw Aermir emerge from the thick fog and walk toward us. He quickly approached me and said,
"My lord, there are eleven left. If you don't mind, I need this high ground."
He wore a smile, neither hurried nor impatient. If I had to describe him in a few words, I would say he was happy. He had been running nonstop for the past twenty or thirty minutes, yet he was not even breathing hard. His breathing was so calm that you would have thought he was taking a pleasant stroll through the forest.
He stood right beside us and began waiting for the knights. The remaining knights were shouting in confusion, and we could barely make out what they were saying. But they were clearly unhappy. Aermir had already taken aim at them as they emerged from the thick fog, but how did he intend to hit them with cloth-tipped arrows from thirty or forty meters away? He was just wasting arrows now. He should have waited until they came closer before shooting.
I had never seen him hold arrows like this. He held an arrow between each finger of his drawing hand, so besides the arrow he had nocked, there were three more between his fingers.
Just as he was about to begin shooting, he whispered something, and a strong wind began blowing toward the knights. His arrows flew one after another, but I had never seen such a rapid rate of fire. It was as though he had shot four arrows at once.
Every knight who rushed out of the thick fog was hit in the chest. I did not know whether to laugh or cry at this sight; even nature was helping him. Thanks to the wind, all his arrows found their targets. How could one person have so much talent and so much luck? Four arrows, four knights down. At that moment, he cheered and said,
"Yes! Right on target!"
Then he drew another four arrows from his quiver and began waiting for more knights. The knights did not even know where the arrows were coming from. We could see them through the trees, but they could not see us. He fired another four shots with lightning speed, but this time, two missed. He looked at me with a beaming smile and said,
"Two more down, my lord, but two of the knights didn't move the way I expected." Five knights remained. I looked at this ten-year-old child's face, but what I saw was not a child. It was a monster, a monster who toyed with my knights as though they were two-year-old toddlers.
The remaining five knights finally realized where Aermir was. They tried every way they could to approach him, zigzagging behind trees for cover, while Aermir tracked them closely and tried to take aim. This time, he did not fire four arrows at once, but shot them one after another. He managed to land another two shots, but he had used up all his arrows.
He took two smoke bombs from the small pouch at his waist and threw them toward the approaching knights. All the knights were instantly engulfed in thick fog. Aermir quickly darted into the fog as well. Shouts and cries of pain came from within, but we could see nothing. Five minutes later, the shouting in the fog turned to low groans, and the fog began slowly dispersing in the wind.
When I saw that the fog had completely cleared and only Aermir stood on the high ground, just one thought came to me. I was not raising a future Arthur Dayne. I was raising a one-man army.