Transmigrated as a Ghost

Waking up after around four hours Marcus felt quite a bit better, though he still had the horrible sense of weakness from having his stats lowered.

Getting up and looking around, he found that at some point Roxene had gotten up and left, leaving him alone.

'Hm guess I should go find everyone.'

Leaving the room, he had been staying in, Marcus walked out just in time to hear Lyra telling Mrazivý something he never wanted her to hear.

"Yeah, one summer my parents got us an inflatable pool, and Marcus had the bright idea to try and jump into it from the trampoline we had. But he overshot it and hit the edge of the pool, before falling out and skidding through the mud." Lyra said while laughing remembering Marcus being completely covered in mud.

Of course, Mrazivý was laughing as well, and when Marcus ran into the room in a fluster, the to girls just looked at him with smirks on their faces.

"Ah Marcus it is good to see you up and so energetic. Oh, and if you are hungry, I have this here which might enjoy." Mrazivý said while holding up a book.

Seeing this. Marcus immediately understood what she was referencing. And he glared at Lyra who must have told Mrazivý about the time when he was three and tried to eat the fruit out of a picture book.

A long round of teasing from both sides assaulted Marcus who, after bit began telling embarrassing stories about both girls as payback.

In the end the three of them were all laughing together, though the jovial atmosphere did not last long.

Naturally they eventually had to get back to reality, and outside the room they were in, was a city that had just survived a tremendous battle.

Lyra had to attend to her duties as ruler, and Marcus had been assigned to dispose of the bodies outside of the wall, as well as collect the weapons and armor of the fallen.

Going along with him, Mrazivý helped out, but the dour scene certainly did not help their moods.

Still, this was part of war, and neither of them had any sort of emotional attachment to those that had died or even this kingdom for that matter.

"I think that this is the last one." Marcus said as he stored away the remains of a damaged mobile stronghold.

He had already collected over a hundred of these weapons of war, all in varying conditions.

Unfortunately, even just one was all he could store in the entirety of his item box, and this only went for the smaller ones.

Eventually though, after working for nearly three days without rest, Marcus and Mrazivý, along with the others that had been assigned to the cleanup, managed to clear out all of the bodies and gather up all of the usable weapons and gear that had been left behind.

It was grueling work both physically and emotionally, but it needed to be done.

After that, the city's walls were fully repaired along with the damaged to the outer ring of the city.

The people mourned and celebrated those that they had lost fighting for their freedom, and quickly the city became lively again even after so many had died.

Life continued moving on, and soon the liberation began executing its next phase, by having other territories join under their banner, while also secretly arming the people in areas that were under the kingdom's rule.

Though they did avoid anywhere that was too close the capital, where the kingdom's forces were congregated.

And unfortunately for the kingdom, along with those that they had lost in the battle for Valenhart, plenty of strong fighters and mages deserted, heading towards the kingdoms to the south, or even traversing the ocean to another continent, while some even joined up with the liberation.

The one major loss that the kingdom received was enough for many to lose their faith in the kingdom, and Teivel's and Felica's deaths proved that even the strongest were not safe during this war.

Now of the original twenty great knights that once served as the pillars of the kingdom, only four remained under the power of the king.

At the very least, those that remained were some of the strongest, with ranks one, two, five, and seven being those that were still alive and loyal to the king.

However, as strong as these four were, they were still just four people, and they alone were not enough to hold an entire nation.

In the next three months as winter raged on, the liberation brought more and more cities and territories into its fold, as leading nobles threw their support behind them, and those that did not were outed in local coups by the people that were being supported by the liberation.

Of course, the kingdom did its best to take these areas back, and sometimes they succeeded, but the difference in resolve and numbers soon became a factor.

The people that were drafted by the kingdom had no desire to fight in the first place, and when the fighting started most deserted quickly and ran for their lives.

On the other hand, the hundreds of thousands of people that fought for the liberation, were doing so because they wanted to and they would fight to the last breath with unending fervor.

Naturally in these coming conflicts some cities even ended up burned to the ground, with hundreds of thousands of people dying on both sides, and over a million all together.

Yet after these three months of horribly bloody civil war, it became painfully clear which side was winning, and that was the liberation.

They simply had the stronger will to fight, the numbers, and the supplies necessary to keep going thanks to their deal with Borealia.

The only thing that the kingdom had going for it was its nigh impenetrable bastion of the capital and the strongest fighters.

Still, with the majority of the kingdom under their control, the liberation mobilized every fighter level ten or over that wished to join them in their siege of the capital.

Soon, a coordinated effort of over a million men and women began to encircle the capital which at this point only had around seventy thousand troops remaining after losing many in the bloody struggle for dominance of the kingdom.

Nevertheless, the large capital city that at one time had five million citizens, though this had now dwindled to around a quarter of this, was heavily fortified.

'So, this is the capital.' Marcus thought as he looked down upon the city the liberation had surrounded.'

It was certainly the largest city he had seen in Tralenstein, being a bit more than twice the size of Valenhart which was the second.

Though it was still far from the size of Borealia's capital that was somewhere between four to five times larger and could easily contend with the biggest cities on Earth.

'Now time to get to work.'

Floating down towards the city, Marcus saw the ever-present barrier that they had deployed in order to protect the city.

Of course, this barrier was not meant to keep anyone out, but it instead acted as an alarm should anyone over a certain level try to enter secretly.

Most large cities had something similar, though they were only activated in times of war since it did take a large amount of mana to keep operational.

However, it only checked for level, and since Marcus was both ethereal and able to alter his recognized level with false status, he was easily able to slip in and begin scouting around.