(Ash) The Masking of Hades

War crimes sure are fun, especially when they're carried out by the LIR against the CHG.

So, the CHG deliberately fills the border-zone between the CHG and LIR with automatic turrets, Ship Destruction Planets (aka DEATH WORLDS), space mines and regular low-value space junk so that it becomes extremely dangerous for the LIR to send forces through. The CHG, however, does leave an opening so that they always know where The LIR or League of Intelligent Races is gonna be coming through and so that they themselves can go on the offensive... yeah keep dreaming CHG.

The planet of Hades is built there with tonnes of resources and fertility and is colonised by the most extreme patriots the CHG can find, including The Shield Tribes, many of whom's descendants would later be subject to The Population Program and some of its consequences (fast version it makes there more people by making twins, triplets and accidental pregnancies more common with nanobots). After that, 20% of the population is allowed into its Defense Force, a portal is set up so that hordes of CHG forces can show up at any time and HUZZAH THE LIR INVADES.

Led by the Sagwalli Shanker, the LIR force aims not for the subjugation of the planet but its quick removal from being a problem to the destruction of the portal before large CHG forces can show up. There's no time to fully melt the planet. So he does the next best thing: just swing the big laser across it while overloading it with power and thus breaking it.

It works. Where the laser made contact with Hades, the ground itself became gas and a huge explosion shot forth from the line that was slashed across the planet. This explosion for cities was, in effect, ridiculously powerful and poisonous wind that swept through them, ripping buildings from the ground at their foundations and tearing away the ground of underground bunkers, followed by the ceilings of those bunkers, followed by those bunkers and everything in them. What few survivors there were, wearing gas masks, struggling to see through the thick air and limping through fallen cities, were attacked by a small force that Shanker left behind to make sure absolutely nobody could come up in any intact ships to fight him as he destroyed the portal and what few CHG forces had come through it in that time.

For decades, there was still a smokey mask over Hades and the CHG was enraged at the loss of 6% of its planets to the LIR as part of the peace deal made when the war from this attack became a stalemate. 63 years later, many of the children and grand-children of what few survivors there had been from the attack were among the forces that reclaimed the territory in the next of many CHG-LIR wars.

But how could there have been survivors with those forces Shanker left behind?: because those survivors, outnumbered 7 to one, killed those invaders. This led to the message being sent on loop to the LIR during all wars from then on: "we will fight when our planets have fallen".