So, it was late last night 🥱 and I was just getting ready for bed. I had just finished three Havens in a row and the ESS was about to burst, like, within a minute. A neut had entered the system while I was in warp to the station and I wanted to wait them out before starting to loot and salvage the sites but that was cut short when an ESS intrusion was announced.

Shit! FC, what do? 😱

As I usually don’t PVP (except for in fleets for home defense) I had nothing really suitable on hand. However, the objective was not really to win a fight against a Tengu (saw it on dscan earlier so I knew what it was), the objective was to get them to sever the link from the ESS so the payout could commence normally because, as said, it was only a minute away. And as my ratting Vexor costs about a third of the ESS payout I figured it was totally worth trying to simply bump them off, then maybe let them finish me 🤷‍♀️ but, most importantly, get the ESS payout.

So I jumped into the ESS, lit them up with my target painter and put my drones on them. The counter on the intrusion had meanwhile already gone down to less than two minutes so I activated my oversized afterburner and went straight for them. I watched their shield booster activate to negate all my damage but oh well, the goal was not necessarily to kill them, moving them would be enough. My armor repairer was able to tank the incoming damage quite well — as a ratting ship in Gurista space I may be slightly over-tanked against kinetic damage — and that is what they chose to hurl at me because that’s what they’re good at. Literally anything else would probably have vapourized me… 😄

Anyway, this went on for a about a minute and then two things happened: they lost their link with the ESS and I noticed they are in 50% armor. I hadn’t even seen that happening! 😮

20 seconds later I got the ESS payout. Objective achieved! 💰

So now I thought, eh, why not? 🤔 I started to orbit them because there was no reason to push them anymore and they didn’t seem to move very fast on their own… I watched my drones slowly chew through their armor and their hull, occasionally seeing the shield booster activate for a small breath of fresh air but ultimately they succumbed to my drones, even though they managed to finish off one of the drones before the battle was over. It’s already replaced!