Wow.

After having spent most of my afternoon running level 4 missions not far from base, I decided I’d go watch some hockey. I’m a huge Montreal Canadiens Fan, and they were playing the best team in the league tonight (an what a win it was for Montreal! Woot!) Then, when it got late enough, I went back online, and found one of my corpmates alone, mining nearby our Corp HQ. He’d been complaining all afternoon about some annoying rats inside his belt of choice, so I went ahead and offered assistance. I figured, since someone helped me once, I’d do the same for a change.

Little did I know this was gonna be my lucky night.

Trying to make a choice of what ship to take for mining purposes was a hard task. My skills aren’t developed enough for the Hulk, and even though I do have a Procurer, I just wanted to see 4-5 lasers going at it at the same time. So I thought of my Gallente Destroyer, but somehow that didn’t work – I couldn’t fit more than 2 Miner II modules on it, so I started thinking… and I remembered I had an old Battlecruiser lying around – a Myrmidon. I’d used one of those in early mining ops before, so I figured – why not?

Loaded it with 4 Miner II’s, one tractor beam and one all important 200mm Railgun II. For self-defense. Hey… not a bad idea.

My mid racks got suddenly loaded with a Warp Scrambler, a Stasis Webifier, 2 Cap Recharger II’s, and my lows had 2 Cap Power Relays and a Cargo Expander II module. I also got 4 mining drones and like, 10 Hammerhead drones. I wanted to be able to go PvP on whoever was trying to loot my corpmate’s stuff.

We mined for about 2 hours straight, me helping out noobs in the corp chan, chatting up the fleet chan as usual, and just really relaxing. My wife called me around midnight, telling me she was coming home from her parents’ house, and as I hung up I raised my eyes…

Flashing Red.

I saw that rat that had been there in the early hours of the work day, harassing my corpmate. I dropped every thing, targeted him right away, locked on the warp scram and webber, launched the drones and literally screamed “FIIIIRRRRRRE!!!” I saw his ship slow down, and the dps got progressively bigger and faster… and all of a sudden, BOOM — fireworks.

I got my first kill.

I whipped back to the fleet chan, knowing full well that someone might retaliate, waiting in the shadow of a cloak… so I told my bud “pack up go to base now”. He warped out promptly to avoid any backfire. I quickly logged in my alt and scrambled to his hauler ship to get the rest of our stuff outta there. As he was coming out of warp, the bastard showed up again. This time, he wasn’t in his pod. He was in a small ship, but he came back to loot his wreck. I targeted him again, but he never aggroed us after that.  He went to the first gate he saw, where I followed him, but not quick enough. I never got to find out whether he jumped or not, so I warped both my ships to base.

And then I sat there.

I got my first kill.

And a righteous kill it was. I was defending our territory, I didn’t pirate my way through to someone. It was exhilarating, to say the least. I didn’t think I had him, but he blew up. I thought for a second he slef-destructed, but now I don’t think he did – he got the big part of the damage in the hull, and that’s when all the drones reached him. To me, it looked like he self-destructed, but he actually got so much dps we just skipped the hull part.

It was great.

I want more.

Screw those ninja looters. They should have known the day of my coming was at hand.