Killing In The Name

There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'time to reload.'
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates - Schlock Mercenary

The point was on before I commanded my ship to move. I had to move quickly and did. My autocannons began to spin as they spat out their barrage ammo, which caused my sensors to pick up the faint blue flash of shield damage. This Rifter's backup would be here any moment, and I was sure that a Thorax would make my day alot shorter. I grinned to myself as another round of barrage punched through his shields and ripped a chunk of armor off his left nacelle.

A couple rounds more and the autocannons were mercilessly punching through his ship and out the other side. Finally a Gremlin rocket found it's mark and the Rifter became an expanding ball of superheated metals and gasses. I placed my scrambler on his capsule and looted his wreck while exploring my options.

Of course by this time my course of action had already been decided, and the Thorax finally arrived. I fired my autocannons twice more and aligned to warp away. He managed a lock and a point before I quite got up to speed. My afterburner was still running as I pulled out of web range. His drones were still approaching me as I broke twenty kilometers and began to warp.

So far so good.

I sat at my central scanning spot and started a conversation with the Thorax pilot. He bemoaned having to buy his friend a new Rifter, and I offered that he should've had a better tank if he was baiting.

My scans located another Rifter just as the Thorax pilot left local. I caught him in the direction of planet five, and began to warp to the second belt. I turned my scanner down to thirty degrees and watched the other belts as they fell out of the arc, to my surprise I discovered I was warping right to him.

As I started to come out of warp, I cycled my warp scrambler and watched for my targeting computers to become active. There he was, he had probably just arrived. I targeted him and began an orbit. His shields went down at a normal pace, and he had yet to target me. I imagined I was lucky enough to catch him completely flat footed as he'd just landed.

Regardless, eventually his targeting system came alive and I experienced a world of hurt. It was worrying, actually, how quickly he chewed through my shields. Then he hit armor and it was like a brick wall. His own armor was slowly eroding, and if he had a repair module he wasn't using it. Then at around twenty percent armor, he finally activated it. I got another round off and watched a single round fly through his right wing before the armor began to grow on his ship again.

Fortunately enough, my damage output far outstretched his repairing, and slowly but surely his ship became nothing more than swiss cheese. I was at about half armor when he finally exploded, and then I pointed his pod and scooped his loot.

I checked out his history, this wasn't a new pilot by any means. He'd been playing a while, so I invited him to speak about a ransom. He promptly put me on ignore.

I attempted to teach him a lesson in respect, but I think I may've gone a bit overboard.

Earlier, when I'd scooped his loot, I was literally amazed at the amount of high quality equipment he was carrying. This was an expensive ship, but upon closer inspection of the kill, I discovered that he had rigged his Rifter. My rifter costs me about two million, give or take. His had cost him forty two million.

Mr. Forty Two Million Isk Rifter, if you're reading this right now, you're doing it wrong.

So I moved back to a scanning location and waited again. Eventually a Slasher showed up on scan, I warped to him, and the ship went down in an embarrassingly short amount of time. The pod was pointed as well, and I didn't even worry about a ransom. I hoped that wherever his clone was, it was in high security space.

He opened up a conversation with me, and I managed to get five hundred and fifty thousand isk out of him for letting him rat there. Not big bucks, I know, but given the situation, I preferred that to killing him again.

Good Day.