I docked my pod in Ladistier and had it immediately loaded into the unscratched hull of the Arbitrator I had stationed there. My thoughts lingered on the undock protocols momentarily. I forgot the undock, and moved the comms into attention.

“Did you manage to get out,” I asked over the fleet channel.

“Yeah, I’m fine, bouncing between safes.”

“Okay, I got a new ship, I’m in Lad. Going to power down for a bit till things cool off and then go have a look around.”

I moved the comm to the periphery, brought up the black box recording of the recent fight, and initiated playback.

[recording]

I am in a Punisher, cutting a curved trajectory toward a caldari state cruiser at 2km per second. My fleet-mate trails behind in an Ishkur. We have joined up with an allied fleet of Federal Defense Union pilots in a Caldari stronghold. Things seem to be going well. I check the progress of the capture drones. 5 minutes on the clock.

A harbinger appears on scan, Aura identifies him as an outlaw. Beyond Divinity corporation. My alert systems come into the foreground. He is disrupting one of the allied pilots.

The Punisher turns on a dime, I set a straight approach vector at the battlecruiser, and leap the distance quickly. My pulse lasers begin to cycle, as does my warp scrambler. His armor is failing.

Alarm systems assault my attention buffer. One, three, four, more… the battlecruisers flood into the complex. System check reveals them all to be Beyond Divinity pilots. I clear my alert buffer and initiate warp… The harby was bait.

The ship jolts as my warp engines are disrupted. A quick systems check reveals I’ve also been webbed. I am flying through molasses, but still making over 700m/s. I think, “there is a chance, I can still get out of range”.

Shields fail, I overheat my microwarp drive, armor fails.

[/recording]

“I shouldn’t have pulled away so hard, my transversal must have dropped hard,” I said to no one in particular. I perused the rest of the kill report, my mind catching on one line.

The line read: Damage taken: 20

I brought the fleet comm back into attention, “So I just lost a trimarked, plated punisher to 20 damage. That was the biggest 20 damage I’ve ever taken,” I couldn’t hold back the laughter.

I calmed myself and set my arbitrator to undock and rendevous with my wing-mate.

We spent the rest of the evening in low sec, without seeing another soul, capturing complexes for the Federation.

Meanwhile, in Villore, a staff of techs looked over the black box recorders in the rest of my ships.