Ambush at the Great Lakes Citadel

The ambush at the Great Lakes Citadel was an attack on the citadel during the Second Dark War. It was the first battle to be fought by & won by the newly formed League of Imperial Cybernetic Hybrids. The shadowghosts participated as well, starting the invasion with a small troop that was sure to be killed, but only to surprise the troops with the Imperial Army's massive forces & the full might of the Imperial War Factory's artillery.

Battle for the Battery
The previous operation, Operation Slick Metal, involved relocating oil batterys from the offshore drills in the oceans to the Great Lakes around the citadel. The purpose was to cut off the amount of oil being used to power the shadowghost held areas of the country & to use the battery resources as power for the citadel. The operation successfully relocated five oil batterys from their Atlantic drills to the Great Lakes. However, the sixth drill had been put on alert in the Pacific after receiving word of the other batterys gone missing. A massive battle ensued between the shadowghosts & the humans, with the humans eventually retreating while the shadowghosts chased after them, mostly to abandon the drilling platform as the fire started was going to cause the battery to explode. However, Erol, a soldier, was accidentally left behind after being separated from his troop & was forced to hide on the drilling platform, where he was blown apart. He was severely injured (though not dead) as his brain somehow miraculously survived. It is possible that the shadowghosts immediately returned to the drill & gathered up his remains & extracted his brain from his severed head.

League of Imperial Cybernetic Hybrids
Erol's body was reconstructed as the first of the many new robotic clones of humans intended to infiltrate the enemy lines as regular humans that were programmed to silently or violently murder their teammates at stealthy or blatant times. However, the shadowghosts failed to recreate Erol's body in the way they'd planned. However, Erol, whose memory had been warped & has lost his sanity, either from the near-death experience, the mental communication between him & the shadowghosts or the transfer & life in his brain while outside his natural body, conversed with the shadowghost leader, Core & arranged to create his own army of robots intended to bring down the humans with the shadowghosts. Erol then dropped his name & became the evil machine-like monster Cyber Erol. Cyber Erol began producing robots similar to his construction & created the Imperial War Factory as home to the League of Imperial Cybernetic Hybrids. It is possible (& very likely) that Cyber Erol was the source of information disclosing the location of the Great Lakes Citadel to the shadowghosts, who then planned their assault.

Relocation
The humans did not know that the Imperials were led by Cyber Erol, as the original Erol was to be presumed dead. It wasn't until a lull in the fighting between the Imperials & the Metropolitan Defense Forces that Erol revealed that he was alive via communicator.

Impact on the shadowghosts
The shadowghosts & Imperials scored a big victory by destroying the citadel. It gave them enough confidence to attack the retreating armys to major metropolises to test their army's strength. The Battle for Metropolitan City, lasting 10 months straight, proved that the humans could fight back & that they could resist their attacks for a long duration of time. At this point, the Alliance was extremely weak. During the entire battle, the first ever invasion of the Dark Nest was in progress. This invasion, lasting 9 months, failed miserably for the humans as the only way to the Nest's interior was through a tunnel that had a barrier in the way, separating the humans from the shadowghost's home. The shadowghosts had also reclaimed their missing oil batterys. However, after pirates attempted to rob a drill platform, the shadowghosts mistook their purpose, slaughtered them & Core sent the message to blow up all the batterys.