Hunting the Hunters

Turns out the PI Epithal is not our only house guest. We also have a couple Manticore pilots hanging out in our wormhole as well. They've been in here for 4 days.

A couple days back when running a combat site in my Drake one of them pops up and tries to kill me somehow. Not sure what their plan was as a passive tank Drake can pretty much tank a single stealth bomber all day long. I lock them up and send in my drones and a volley of heavy missiles. They go down to 25% structure before getting out. It's a shame I don't have a point on my site running drake. I may have to fix that in the future.

Anyways, my picket picks them up leaving through the hi-sec static and I thought that was that. But, the next day, I see them briefly on d-scan. I wasn't running sites as I was getting a pile of traffic from the 5 (!) wormhole connections coming into our home. So, I decide to stay cloaked up and see what I could catch.

With a data site available I decide to wait in there and see if one of the scanning ships coming in and out of our system decides to run the site and if that draws out the Manticore.

My plan to use strangers as bait works out. An Imicus and a Magnate run the site and a Manticore decloaks and start firing torps at them. I slowboat to briefly to the Manticore to get inside scram range and decloak my PvP fit Astero. Locked. Scramed. Turn on afterburner, Orbit at 7km. Sic my drones on them. He goes down fast and barely dents my shields. He manages to get his pod away.

So, why are missiles still hitting me? Oh, looks like in my excitement I didn't notice it wasn't just one manticore but two. Get that guy locked up. Scrammed and he joins his friend in a pod. This one did get me into armor but nothing a single cycle of my ancillary repper couldn't solve.

They managed to get their pods back out to high sec before I could track them down.

Sigh.

So, I loot and salvage their wrecks making me about 12 mil richer. Not a terrible payout for 30 seconds of work. I almost felt bad using strangers as bait but I didn't get even a simple thanks for coming to their rescue (albeit for entirely selfish reasons).

Fast forward to later in the night and I briefly see a familiar sight on d-scan. Looks like my Manticore friend is back again.

I guess they want to go to round 3?