The God of War.

It had been a quiet evening in Egghelende, I had brought out my prober ship for a while, to discover the mission runners I was hunting for had left, or been found already. Then when I swapped back to my rifter, it looked like the missions ruuners knew, and they were back in the system again.

Frustrating really. Nothing was going boom.

Finally we caught something in an asteroid belt, and there was a satisfying explosion! Can't find the killlmail on the board, but i'm sure it will turn up. Even managed to grab that guys pod and pop it too.

It was amusing to find someone in a pod, examining their corpse. It was even more amusing to make that pod go pop too! Two of the same corpse in the same belt! Sometimes you've just got to do these things.

Late in the evening, most of the corp had logged off, there were only 2 of us left, and I decided to be a bit reckless. There was an Ares (see where the god of war title ties in folks?) prowling about the system, we'd seen it at a distance a few times, but hadn't engaged it.

I went looking for it, and I found it.

Looking back, that wasnt the smartest move I'd ever made, tackling an interceptor without a MWD or long range weapons, but like I said, sometimes you've just got to do these things.

So, once I'd tried to tackle the Ares, I was warp scrambled and he was orbiting me at 20km, well out of range of anything on my ship, and of course my AB won't match him for speed so i can't close the gap.

Thankfully my corp mate was on hand to enter the fray, and Allsop came warping into see what he could do.

Thats around when things got slightly more interesting.

Instead of possibly tackling the Ares, just as Allsop warped in, so did a Taranis. It picked Allsop as a target, and I switched my target to the Taranis and started closing on it. At this stage I'm thinking 'Great, now we got this on top of us, we can try to kill it, then the Ares will swoop in on us. We're gonna die.'

The Ares warped out, guess he's not into group action in belts much.

The Taranis was pounding holes in Allsop's ship, but we were blowing large chunks of armor off it too. Allsop let me know he was taking a lot of damage, but to keep on the Taranis.

I started taking damage, a Punisher had warped in to join the party, it was orbiting me.

As the view panned round I saw an explosion, checked my targets, and saw that the Taranis was still there, barely. Allsop's ship had had transformed into a fireball, I was alone. I continued firing my autocannons and rockets while targetting the Punisher. If I lived through this, he was next.

I swapped my web to the punisher, hoping reducing his velocity while keeping my afterburner going would help in some way avoid his incoming fire.

The Ares re-appeared! It warped in 4Km from me in the midst of the fight.

Then the Taranis popped. Relief briefly swept through me as I turned my adrenalin soaked attention to the others. I webbed the Ares since it was close, if the Punisher went down, the Ares was next if I could get to him. I scrambled the punisher and moved to orbit him at 6Km, hoping he was using short range turrets, my afterburners screamed as I gained distance, my shield was gone, and my armor was dropping. I threw on my armor repairer as my guns opened up on the punisher, the Ares was making a direct line out of range. Suddenly I stopped taking damage. Half way into armor, and I'd made it out of range of the Punisher's guns, my armor repairer was steadily replacing the lost bits of ship. He fired his NOS but it mustn't have been on autorepeat, i started cycling my armor repairer in case he used it again. The Ares was out of range of my web, I swapped it back to the Punisher, and my guns really started doing damage.

A few seconds later, the Punisher popped, I checked around and the Ares was 35km away and closing back in. I warped to a safe and breathed a long sigh of relief.

That was a fun fight. I didn't manage to get any loot from either ship as the Ares must have come back in and scooped it all, but I survived to tell the tale. Plus it added to more kills to the killboard!