Virginia still smoldered with the ashes of June's slaughter when July crept in.
The fields around Richmond were littered with bloated corpses, half-buried in shallow graves or left to rot where they fell.
Union cannon sat abandoned in muddy gullies, wheels splintered, barrels blackened.
For the Confederacy, the victory over McClellan's grand army was nothing less than miraculous.
For Elias, it was the product of careful investment, a harvest of credits well spent.
Now, with fifteen thousand Greybacks on Virginian soil, the entire tone of the war shifted.
Lee's staff whispered of the offensive—no longer defending Richmond like a wounded fox, but striking northward, clawing at Washington itself.
And why not?
McClellan had fled to the James like a whipped cur.
Northern morale buckled under the news.
The South smelled opportunity.
But Elias had different priorities.
From the cliffside fortress at Bar, he sat at his table of maps once again, tracing crimson threads down the coastlines.
Virginia was secure, yes—but security was not profit.
Victory in the field gave him little beyond prestige in Confederate circles.
He needed resources, raw material to keep his vaults flowing with credits.
Battles won the South acclaim, but plunder won Elias power.
And so his eyes turned to the Carolina coast.
The Union still clung to footholds there—at New Bern, at Morehead City, at Roanoke Island.
Bases carved from the tidewaters in spring of 1862, defended by garrisons and flotillas.
To the Union, they were stepping stones to blockade the Confederacy tighter, staging points for inland incursions, to divide Confederate forces having to stand at the frontline while watching their backs.
To Elias, they were ripe orchards waiting to be stripped.
The Greybacks would move—not with Lee's army toward Washington, but eastward, to drive the Yankees into the sea.
Word of this second "offensive" trickled only to a select circle in Richmond.
Officially, the plan was Lee's northern push.
But within the hidden councils of Elias's lieutenants, the true orders were clear.
Entire Greyback regiments were detached under pretense of reinforcing the coast.
They marched swift and silent down dusty Carolina roads, rifles slung, eyes fixed, their columns accompanied by Elias's new fleet shadowing the shoreline.
By mid-July, the strike began.
The Union had not expected it.
They believed the Confederates were too drained by the Seven Days to mount anything serious beyond Virginia, at least as far as the east was concerned.
Yet at New Bern, Greyback vanguards hit like a thunderclap.
Rifle fire cracked with a rate impossible to match.
Union pickets collapsed before they knew they were under attack.
One North Carolina regiment in blue was reduced to shredded tatters in an hour, their survivors running screaming through the streets of the town.
Then the city was theirs.
But unlike Lee's men, who might have held the place as a bulwark, the Greybacks treated it as spoil.
Warehouses of grain, tobacco, naval stores—tar, pitch, timber—were loaded into waiting ships.
Banks were emptied at bayonet point.
Merchants were stripped of coin, silks, and arms.
Churches were ransacked for their bronze bells, melted later into ingots.
Civilians to the last were cut down, their homes likewise looted for all they were worth, the villages contents being loaded up onto Elias's ships leaving nothing but an empty husk behind, a former dwelling turned to graveyard.
By the time Union reinforcements stirred from Roanoke, New Bern was hollowed out like a husk, its wealth already vanished under the watchful escort of Elias's cruisers.
To the North, it would appear nothing more than Confederate cruelty, a bloody sack of a loyal town.
None would suspect that the treasure flowed not to Richmond, but across the Atlantic into the hungry furnaces of Bar.
The raids did not stop there.
Morehead City fell next, its docks burning even as Elias's ships swallowed up cotton bales and crates of rifles.
At Roanoke, Greyback sharpshooters turned the island into a killing field, bottling the Union garrison into their own fortifications until Elias's ironclads shelled them into submission.
The prisoners well they did not reach captivity, their weapons seized, their powder sent to confederate ports, while cannons, and cannonballs were shipped home.
Each strike followed the same rhythm: swift, merciless, thorough.
And always the Greybacks vanished afterward, melting away into the countryside or re-embarking aboard shadowed transports.
By the time Northern newspapers printed the news, the raiders were gone, the loot already smelted or shipped, while the horrors they left behind were reported by the Confederate papers as the last desperate act of the Union, the wholesale slaughter of innocents rather than face defeat once again.
Union commanders raged in frustration, as this news travelled north.
Some blamed Lee, others cursed the "barbarity of the rebels."
Given that no forces returned from the Carloinas they could not believe the propoganda that their own men had done such things.
In Richmond, Davis and his cabinet could only marvel.
Reports from Virginia spoke of Lee pressing north, recovering territory lost in west Virginia while the coast sang of victories none had dared hope for.
Back in Montenegro, Elias counted his winnings.
The Carolina raids poured more into his vaults though piracy of military ships was still the greatest source of piracy.
Ships arrived daily, their holds bursting with iron, coal, copper, and coin.
Entire banks' worth of silver now lay stacked in carts destined for the refineries.
The foundries roared, smelting church bells and cannon alike into raw credit.
he was prepared, with each haul that returned Elias, started production of more ships, more riflemen squads—more Greyback regiments, more ironclads to raid the american coasts.
Perhaps even the deployment of new engines of war.
Mounted gatling guns, expensive to produce but thanks to the lottery he already had five such deployments he could do for free amounting to fifteen total gatling guns.
A number that could create a firm defensive hold that would not break even if an entire union army charges lest they be lucky with artillery fire.
The North, however, was not broken.
Though newspapers groaned with tales of sack and ruin, though morale sagged in Boston and New York, the war machine did not stop.
New levies were called.
New factories lit their chimneys, as the entire american economy shifted into a war economy.
And naval squadrons redoubled their hunt for the phantom fleet that haunted their coastlines.
Elias knew the tide would swell again.
McClellan's failure would birth another army, larger and more determined.
The Union would not simply yield because Carolina burned.
But he did not need them to yield—only to bleed.
As July waned, Elias stood once more above the Adriatic, staring into the black waters beneath his fortress.
The sea breeze tugged at his cloak, the scent of smoke and salt filling his lungs.
Virginia was safe.
Carolina was gutted.
His fleet was stronger than ever.