The weeks after Rich Mountain brought only more Confederate headlines of glory.
Bull Run in July had shaken Washington to its core; green Union regiments fled in disarray, abandoning cannon, muskets, even their own shoes.
In August, at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, the Federals had been dealt another staggering blow.
The myth of Southern invincibility seemed only to grow with each passing day.
Yet Elias did not rejoice.
From his study across the sea, he tracked the reports through the System.
He saw casualty numbers, the names of commanders, the shifting lines on crude campaign maps.
He listened to Rex's and Varga's detached accounts of smoke-filled hills and broken Federal lines.
And beneath it all, a cold worry gnawed at him.
If the Confederacy won too easily—if his Greybacks ensured triumph in every theater—then the war might end before it could truly consume the continent.
That was not the plan.
Victory must be hard-earned.
Hatred must deepen.
The fire must be fed until it burned everything.
So, in late July, the orders came: stand down.
Rex and Varga received the command in silence.
Their men were withdrawn from Virginia, marching not in triumph but in shadow, dispersing into the countryside before regrouping beyond the lines.
The Confederate officers who had seen them fight marveled at their sudden disappearance, whispering of foreign mercenaries recalled by some unseen patron.
But for the Virginians left behind, it meant facing the Federals without the stone wall of the Greybacks to anchor their line.
August passed with Confederate banners flying high.
But September brought a change.
At Carnifex Ferry in the rugged hills of western Virginia, Brigadier General Floyd's men were driven back after a fierce contest.
The retreat was orderly, but it was retreat all the same.
A week later at Cheat Mountain, the Union repulsed another Southern advance.
The newspapers in Washington seized on the news, heralding at last the breaking of the "Confederate charm."
In Richmond, men scowled over their papers, cursing incompetent generals and cowardly militia.
The whispers grew louder: perhaps the victories had been accidents, perhaps the South was not immortal after all.
Mothers who had cheered at Bull Run now wept for sons lost in the mountain fog.
Elias read those lines with satisfaction.
It was necessary.
Let the Confederacy taste defeat.
Let the North taste hope.
Both sides must believe final victory still within reach, so they would hurl ever greater armies into the furnace.
For Varga and Rex, the lull was strange.
They drilled their men in secluded camps, sharpening discipline, endlessly waiting for the call to march one more, but never once even considering disobeying the orders of their supreme commander.
They walked through villages where war had not yet come, where children stared at them wide-eyed, and where locals whispered of past miracles at Philippi, Little Bethel, and Rich Mountain.
Some called them "guardian angels of Virginia."
Others said they were demons, bound to blood.
But in truth, they were idle.
They waited, listening through the System for Elias's voice, their purpose suspended.
At night, Varga sometimes stood alone by the campfires, watching the sparks drift upward into the black.
By October, the answer began to take shape.
Missouri.
The western border seethed with divided loyalties.
Union and Confederate forces grappled for control of rivers and railroads.
Along the Mississippi, a rising Federal officer named Ulysses S. Grant had begun to make his mark.
His name appeared more and more in dispatches—restless, aggressive, unwilling to sit idle.
Elias studied those reports with unusual interest.
Unlike McClellan, Grant lacked polish, but he possessed something rarer: resolve.
He pressed forward where others hesitated.
He accepted losses as the cost of progress.
Men like that could not be ignored—they had to be tested, perhaps even ended, before their star rose too high.
So, in October, the orders came across the tether: move west.
Varga's detachment broke camp first, then Rex's, both slipping quietly through Virginia, then Tennessee, until at last they merged with Confederate columns heading toward the Mississippi a large contingent of moving men close to half their total number headed west, while the other half remained in waiting hiding amonst the local waiting for their own chance to enter the fray once more.
They were to be present at Belmont, where Grant himself prepared to strike.
Elias's instructions were precise: fight, but do more than fight.
If the chance arose, seize Grant.
A captured general could sway the war as surely as any battle.
The Greybacks marched in silence, their boots crunching frost as autumn deepened.
Along the way, they passed straggling columns of ordinary Confederates—farm boys in butternut, faces thin from hunger, their uniforms already tattered.
The contrast was stark.
Elias's men moved like an army of iron, steady and unbroken, while the volunteers stumbled, muttering prayers for shoes and rations.
Yet both marched under the same banners, and both marched toward the same river.
When they reached Missouri in early November, they found a land already torn by war.
Barns burned along the horizon.
The sound of musket fire echoed from distant skirmishes.
Families fled across muddy roads, wagons piled high with what little they could carry.
And always, in the distance, the Mississippi flowed—broad, brown, relentless.
Whoever commanded its banks commanded the heart of America.
There, amid the marshes and the timbered flats near a place called Belmont, Rex and Varga readied their men once more.
The lull was over.
Their rifles would speak again.
Elias read their reports and closed his eyes.
Already the war had begun to consume itself.
Victories and defeats, triumphs and humiliations—each fed the other, driving North and South deeper into hatred.
But Belmont would be different.
Belmont was not simply another battle.
It was a chance to reach into the very marrow of the Union's rising command and snap it.
And if Grant fell, what chain of consequences might follow?
Would the Union stagger without him?
Would the Confederacy rise taller, emboldened by such a capture?
Or would another man, fiercer still, step into his place?
Elias did not know.
But that was the experiment.
So he whispered into the System, his words carried across the tether to his captains:
Engage.
Strike hard.
If the opportunity comes—take him alive.
If not then eliminate him as the first General to fall in this war.
The Greybacks listened.
They made ready.
And on the banks of the Mississippi, the fire of war prepared to leap higher still.
meanwhile back home Elias mused about how much history would change if Grant was disgraced with capture, or removed entirely would he still become a future president or even candidate for that matter?