September of 1862 brought no peace to America.
The crops stood ripe, but across the borderlands of Kentucky, harvest was drowned in the tramp of armies.
For the Confederacy, summer had been a season of blood.
Lee had carried the war into Maryland, fighting at South Mountain and Antietam in the hopes of striking a decisive blow.
The fields there had run red, yet the gains were fleeting.
Lee was forced back to Virginia, bruised but not broken.
Richmond remained secure, yet the Confederacy's chance at foreign recognition withered in the wake of Northern proclamations and European hesitation.
But Elias did not march with Lee.
He no longer answered to Richmond's call.
By September, his Greybacks had swollen to a force unto themselves.
Twenty thousand riflemen—scarred veterans of Donelson and the Seven Days, joined by fresh columns of recruits drawn forth from the ports of Bar.
They marched not under the Stars and Bars, but under their own silent banners, a host feared by Confederate and Union alike, but luckily or not so in this matter they sided with the south.
Alongside them rolled the newest horrors of the war—fifteen mounted Gatling guns, iron-framed and hand-cranked, spitting fire faster than any musket could hope to answer.
And behind them came the thunder of Elias's fleet.
No longer merely raiders, no longer shadows steeling away in the night—they were ironclads now, black and towering, their armored hulls defiant against Union broadsides.
Twenty vessels strong, prowling the coasts with impunity, they challenged the Union Navy in open battle.
Where they struck, the waves boiled with fire, taking damage sure but never enough to sink a vessel, and upon return to friendly ports they could be repaired thanks to the system not requiring drydocking for months but repairs that occured simply overnight.
Elias did not intend to defend the Confederacy.
He intended to bleed the North dry, and in response the north would further make the south bleed.
Already his rough estimates had stated that in casualties alone after a year and a half of war, they had reached the number of casualties from battle after the full four years in his history.
Anything that happened now was just icing to the cake of weakening american for the coming future.
The orders went out in early September.
The Greybacks would march through Kentucky, not as liberators, not as an occupying army, but as reavers.
They would cross the Ohio River, drive into Indiana, and split the Union's heartland wide.
Not to hold—never to hold—but simply to plunder.
The gold, the gems, the banks, the storehouses of the Midwest would flow southward into Elias's coffers, fueling yet more armies, more ships, more weapons of fire, and do to the union what they as of yet failed to do to the confederacy, force their hand as reinforcing armies were sent eastward rather than continuing on into virginia.
The Confederacy looked on in awe and fear.
Lee and Davis could not command Elias, but neither could they stop him.
His army was too strong, his navy too vast.
Better, they thought, to let the Greybacks run their course and hope the Union bore the brunt.
So it began.
The Greybacks marched from eastern Tennessee in grim silence, boots striking like drums upon the September roads.
Kentucky had long been divided—its people torn between North and South, its fields scarred by months of raiding, and battles.
But none of them had yet seen what Elias's new host would bring.
At Bowling Green the Greybacks struck their first blow.
A Union supply depot, guarded by two regiments of raw recruits, was reduced to ash in a single night.
The Gatlings raked the fields with streams of lead, mowing down men who had barely shouldered muskets.
Greyback riflemen swept the streets, clearing houses one by one until the town lay silent save for the screams of the dying.
The stores of corn, wheat, and powder were loaded into wagons, sent south to the confederacy, while every ounce of gold or silver was stripped from banks and merchants destined for Europe.
By the third day, Bowling Green was a shell, its survivors wandering like wraiths among the ruins, fleeing east from their homes.
From there, they drove north, faster than Union command could react.
Telegraphs carried frantic warnings: the devils march again.
Whole brigades were summoned from Louisville and Cincinnati, but the Greybacks moved with inhuman precision, brought on by system training of an era of fighting that had not yet come to pass in this world.
At Elizabethtown, they captured a train laden with rifles and cannon.
The passengers—civilians fleeing northward—were not spared.
Their luggage, rich with jewelry and coin, was seized, their corpses left beside the rails.
The cannon were dragged by Greyback teams into waiting wagons, to be sent back under escort toward Elias's iron fleet.
The Union response came at last near the Ohio River.
A force of fifteen thousand Federals under General Don Carlos Buell entrenched at Louisville, determined to bar the road into Indiana.
Their lines stretched along the southern bank of the Ohio, cannon bristling, banners snapping defiantly in the wind.
Elias did not hesitate, he sent his men in.
On a mist-shrouded dawn, his army surged forward.
Gatling guns barked from the ridges, streams of lead shredding Union skirmishers before they could fire a shot.
Greybacks advanced in grim columns, rifles firing in disciplined volleys that tore whole gaps through Buell's brigades.
The Union fought with valor—Kentuckians, Hoosiers, and Ohio boys alike—but against the storm they broke like driftwood.
By noon the field was a charnel house.
Thousands of blue-coated corpses lay strewn across the banks of the Ohio, the river itself stained crimson.
Buell's survivors fled in disarray into Louisville, barricading the streets as Greybacks looted the outskirts.
Warehouses were emptied, treasuries stripped, even church altars robbed of their gold.
But Elias did not linger.
Louisville was not his prize—it was Indiana.
Crossing the Ohio, the Greybacks stormed into New Albany and Jeffersonville.
Banks were gutted, jewelers forced at gunpoint to disgorge their wealth.
Cannon by the dozen were hauled back across the river, loaded onto barges to feed Elias's growing war machine.
Entire neighborhoods were put to the torch.
The slaughter was worse than Donelson, worse than Pea Ridge.
Families who begged for mercy were shot where they stood.
And always, the loot sent across the south destined to be loaded aboard Elias's waiting ships, guarded by ironclads that no Union flotilla dared challenge.
By October, Indiana lay in panic.
Rumors spread faster than news: that the Union government itself would fall before the year's end. That nothing could stop the confederates marching north.
In Washington, Lincoln raged, demanding Buell and his officers answer for the catastrophe.
Yet even his words could not hide the truth—the Union had been split, not by strategy, but by terror.
For the Confederacy, the Greybacks' march was a double-edged sword.
On one hand, Union forces that might have crushed Lee were pulled northward, desperate to defend their own soil.
On the otherhand the brutality in which they acted, shocked the confederae leadership, victory was the goal, but even for these slave trader sponsering men, the large scale looting and slaughter of their own people... it was something they could barely accept.
but when faced with reports of the goods being sent down from the north to breath life into their dwindling economy new life was breathed back into their minds.
Who cares if the north bleeds, they which to take away what is our, why should we care if we take away what is theirs in return.
By November, the Greybacks withdrew at last, their wagons groaning with gold, silver, cannons, and gems.
Town after town smoldered in their wake.
The Ohio Valley lay scarred, its people displaced and fleeing for safer lands, its armies bled to the point the state practically had no standing army remaining.
His fleets were not idle either, sinking multiple federal gunboats, after pillaging them of their cannon and metal, spies in Richmonds reported news that the union was even pulling forces back along the mississippi towards new orleans, possibly extracting themselves from the region entirely.
While in the north new fleets were being built hasitly to recover from their losses and create a grand fleet one that might finally bring an end to the curse upon the eastern seaboard.
By winter's first frost, Elias remained in the fortress of Bar, maps spread before him, the spoils of Kentucky and Indiana glittering in stacked chests waiting to be hauled from the port warehouses to the refinery for processing.