The Hunter Became the Hunted

Today I had a days holiday form work so I it was a fair no-brainer for me to have an EvE day.

It was a quiet morning before downtime with a few people evading me in a Rifter and two Hulks. Jumping into my home system I found local crowded with a couple of people at POS's, a couple of old pirates docked up and a single "target" player. Deciding that it wasn't worth the risk of being jumped by the older pirates I left the target alone and moved on to the next system over.

The next system over was empty, so I warped to a gate many AU's away. Just as I arrived at the gate the target I had seen jumped into this system. Pulling a U-turn in my Rifter I headed back to a scanning safe. To be disappointed by one of the aforementioned old pirates jumping in aswell. Holding at my safe he didn't stay long and must have only been passing through, I set about scanning for the Rupture.

On a related topic, I don't know what happened to the fear of Ruptures I previously held, I seem to be rather gung-ho about attacking them lately!

Anyway, I digress. Eventually the Rupture turned up at a belt, I assume he had been in a safe. Warping into the belt my heart sank a bit when I saw him 35km away. Putting the pedal to the metal (If Rifters have pedals?) I closed the distance as quick as possible. Using the camera zoom I noticed he was moving away from me, but not aligned with anything, at 12km he turned and I thought he was leaving.

I got my lock and scram in before he could and we both started taking shield damage, he dropped a bunch of hammerheads on me along with a Nos, Neut, Web & Scram. This didn't look good! Primarying the Hammerheads I took a couple out before they were recalled, my cap had gone and I was struggling to hold scram and I could forget about the AB. Where I could I grabbed a Rep cycle and everytime my cap-booster had reloaded I dropped a new charge into the Capacitor. I was quickly down to below half armour. Taking care of the last Hammerheads I started applying damage to the Rupture itself. Damage on me at this point had dropped massively thanks to there being no more drones. My opponent was still getting the occasional Neut cycle out but he was clearly capped out but I made pretty quick progress down to half structure when I needed to reload. Slapping in new clips of ammo I resumed the offensive and at around 10% structure the pilot requested me to stop guns for 10m isk. Before I had time to reply the Rupture was a pretty explosion and I locked down the Pod. Deciding to offer a Ransom of 10m isk (see what I did there?) we agreed and I received the ransom and let him away with a day pass.

After the fight and good fights exchanged the pilot wanted to chat so I warped away to a safe. We spoke awhile about the fight and it turned out that he was a friend of the Stabber & Scythe pilots who I came across last weekend. I blew up his friends Scythe and Pod and the Stabber got away. He had been trying to hunt me down for a couple of days. This suprised me as I had no idea that I was being hunted! Perhaps we will lock horns again some time.

The overriding factor of this fight for me was that the Cap-Booster had once again saved my ass big-time.