Our story

By January the Watermelon and the Vard Fortizar were both gone. The Cope, a satirical paper that covered FL33T with undisguised glee, had run the eviction twice: "BIGAB/SEDIT/BUSA evict FL33T from Vard," and then "FL33T Fortizar destroyed in Vard."

Vard itself had fallen to the Amarr on the seventh of December, and its NPC stations were closed to the militia. The pilots who had called it home went on running its plexes and contesting its Battlefields from the systems next door.

On the eighth of January, Local is Primary brought Apocalypses into Vard, and the militia killed seventeen of them in two hours.

In the Dronelands, FL33T was flying a Rokh doctrine by January, with a capital wing of Revelation Navy Issues and Zirnitras and a Machariel wing for the larger coalition fights.

The regulars there were Rote Kapelle, SL0W, the Goons and B0SS, the Brotherhood of Spacers. The Fraternity was contesting the same systems FL33T was farming.

The year's first capital brawl came on the third of January, in the Kalevala Expanse. FL33T brought Typhoon Fleet Issues and dreadnoughts, shot a SL0W Azbel in K76A-3 to within eight seconds of dying, and held it there as bait until B0SS committed capitals to the grid.

B0SS came for the logistics first: three FL33T Zarmazds in twenty-five seconds, then Casper Sullivan's Vindicator.

Deepwater Hooligans lit a cyno and dropped capitals of their own to third-party B0SS.

BearThatCares's titan jumped onto the grid instead of bridging.

Very stressful.

B0SS lost over two hundred billion ISK of ships that night. FL33T lost thirty-three billion and kept its titan. The battle record went out under the title "B0SS is now b0ss".

In the warzone, MINMIL pushed on into Tandoiras, the Bleak Lands constellation where the Dragon Riders Legion kept its Keepstar.

The fighting there was small-gang work in Oyonata and Kurniainen, and the Dragon Riders won most of it, roughly two ships for every one they lost.

In the small hours of the second of January, a Dragon Riders gang in Kurniainen caught a FL33T fleet, then shot down three of its propaganda broadcast structures, one after another.

In Oyonata, one Dragon Rider, Allegra Luna, worked through three FL33T hulls in a row and took the last of them alone, in a Federation Navy Comet.

So far, the reckoning was going the Dragon Riders' way.

On the thirteenth of January, Goonswarm and The Initiative killed that Keepstar, in Sahtogas, with eleven hundred pilots on the killmail. Three of them were FL33T. The Fraternity was there on the Dragon Riders' side, and lost a hundred and seventy-one ships to Goonswarm that afternoon.

Three days later came the exposé.

DRL EXPOSÉ - AMARR PACT WITH FRT/DRL - KNONO LEAVES MINMIL and more!

By Frontlines' account, the Amarr had a pact with the Fraternity and the Dragon Riders, which would explain what the Fraternity had been doing at that Keepstar. The same issue carried worse news for the militia: KNONO, whose dreadnoughts had landed first on the Avatar in Dal, was leaving MINMIL.

The Fraternity had crept back into Aldodan over the summer. By the first of March, the militia had taken it back.

On the twenty-first of January, Black Omega Security left the alliance, and Ibn Khatab went with it.

Black Omega had flown with FL33T since May of YC125. In ten days that November it had lost its Sotiyo and five Fortizars, the Watermelon last.

Khatab was the pilot who had once taken a day off to fight the Amarr for seven hours, and the Watermelon had been his. It had been dead for eight weeks. Buppas left with them.

Three days later they were in Test Alliance Please Ignore.

That same day, the alliance's propaganda ran under the title "Minmatar Fleet Alliance likes the game." On the twenty-eighth came the obituary.

The Death of Minmatar Fleet

The sixth of March was a Friday. In its small hours, FL33T killed a Goonswarm control tower in 3H58-R, in Etherium Reach, and Chicago Milkman landed the final blow. A Deep Space Transport had been seen on the same route for a second day.

A Sabre went out onto that route to catch the transport, and the rats waited three hours. What came down the route was not the transport.

One Goonswarm Nyx missed the bubble by less than ten kilometers.

The other one landed inside it.

Nine dreadnoughts came in on the Nyx. Between them, the Nyx and a Nidhoggur killed the heavy interdictor holding them, Chicago Milkman's Devoter. It died three seconds before the Nyx did, and he made the Nyx's killmail from his pod.

Final blow to Risa Kelara, in a Revelation Navy Issue. The Nidhoggur followed it.

The Nyx was FL33T's first supercarrier kill.

Casper Sullivan filed the record from work.

A week later, a Hard Knocks Fortizar came out for its final timer at Y4B-BQ, in the Spire, and a dozen alliances turned up to fight over it. Deepwater Hooligans brought a Nightmare fleet and more pilots than anyone.

FL33T had come for dreadnoughts, and anyone's would do. Its first dreadnought kills were HOLD MY PROBS Zirnitras. The plain Revelations it dropped died early. The Revelation Navy Issues lasted, and before long FL33T was killing dreadnoughts from five alliances.

Then Deepwater came for FL33T's capitals. By the time the Fortizar died, FL33T had lost eighteen dreadnoughts, and it still came out about four to one ahead on the ISK.

When it was over, one point three trillion ISK had been destroyed.

The largest ISK fight in the alliance's history.

About fourteen hundred pilots from a dozen alliances were on the killmails at Y4B-BQ. A hundred and six of them were Minmatar Fleet: the hundred lowsec chads, as BearThatCares had called them back in YC126, three years out of Amo.

One stratop that January had ended without a fight. The enemy would not undock against FL33T's Rokhs and righteous dreadnoughts.

Not all AARs need action.

So BearThatCares and Vex Drake went mining. The record has a screenshot of it: two ships at an asteroid belt, guns cold, holding position in a system that had been their target twenty minutes earlier.