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Minmatar Fleet turned one in the first week of YC126, and the Rattini went looking for a birthday present.

On the seventh of January, BearThatCares finished the town hall and called for fleet formation right away. The fleet went back to KBP7-G, the Providence system where it had fought Curatores Veritatis Alliance in November.

What do you get an alliance for their birthday? A war, of course.

KBP7-G sat at the edge of CVA's space, within bridging range of FL33T's warzone staging, so the campaign could run without abandoning the warzone. It also offered something FL33T had wanted since the capital fights in Floseswin: sovereignty warfare, entosis links and all.

BearThatCares split the operation into five wings, each with its own commander and comms: the main FL33T fleet, a small gang special interest group, the Minmatar Death Squad, Ushra'Khan, and DammFam.

A year after turning the Rattini away, Ushra'Khan flew one of their wings.

Intelligence had CVA forming Tempest Fleet Issues, with Triumvirate, Absolute Honor, LinkNet, Red Menace Coalition and Snuffed Out behind them.

Every major Providence-aligned group was forming.

I was fairly confident we could get the CVA and their friends to commit capitals here. They cannot replace capitals as fast as us, so we wanted to kill them as early in the campaign as possible.

In the first engagement, CVA's friends arrived with dreadnoughts and killed FL33T's force auxiliary. Without triage, a long fight became a race. FL33T called the extract and reshipped.

While the main fleet reshipped, Furl0w's six-pilot small gang special interest group was running entosis cycles in TU-O0T, in the same constellation. Their command destroyer spent ten minutes on the link and proved, in the group's own words, unkillable to the nullsec pilots trying to pin it down. The node percentage kept climbing while everyone else was busy.

By the third engagement, the Territorial Claim Unit timer was out. FL33T bridged into KBP7-G in Sleipnirs and found three enemy fleets waiting: Eagles, Cyclone Fleet Issues, Feroxes. Snuffed Out were in Turnur, busy with Deepwater Hooligans, and nowhere near the field.

We smoked them. It was kind of embarrassing.

A Minokawa held the grid while the Sleipnirs cleared the enemy formations. Then FL33T's own Territorial Claim Unit came online in KBP7-G, the first sovereignty flag in XV7L-S, the constellation FL33T called the Pride of Minmatar.

In the middle of January, Snuffed Out's comms leaked. The leak confirmed that the Snuffers were helping CVA fend off FL33T's capital escalations, for an undisclosed sum. Metropolis Daily News looked into the sum.

Our reporters found out that the aforementioned undisclosed sum is ... a well-curated collection of feet pics. A petition has been signed tonight by more than 10 ppl to rename CVA to Curatores Pedum Pictūra.

Twan Molenaar led the follow-up with Cyclone Fleet Issues and Scimitar logistics. CVA declined to engage until its allies had assembled.

Athanors died.

The infrastructure hub's final timer came out on the third of February. The opposition formed cleanly: Osprey Navy Issues and Tornados, thirty of each, with sixty Eagles and Feroxes. FL33T had brought Basilisks that day, and the Tornados were the problem. They could volley a Basilisk off the field in a single alpha strike before the force auxiliary could land reps.

Twenty-one Basilisks died.

The entosis links kept cycling anyway, because the objective does not care how pretty the grid looks. The infrastructure hub fell to FL33T, and the force auxiliary sat out the rest of its triage cycle and got away.

Once again CVA sits at three hundred kilometers and watches as we chew through their allies.

On the second of March, Molenaar commanded an operation titled CVA Baited on a Free Moros.

The Moros belonged to one of FL33T's own: Braincandle Avalhar of Black Omega Security, who had said he was bringing a Drake. He brought it into KBP7-G instead. He had fitted it with an entosis link, which is not what dreadnoughts are for.

The Curators found it.

The Curators killed it.

It took them seven dreadnoughts. The fight around the bait was Molenaar's from start to finish, and he held the grid while Tornado alpha strikes peeled his Cyclone Fleet Issues away one by one. By the end of the evening CVA had lost two Minokawas, a Phoenix Navy Issue, a Zirnitra and nine Nightmares. Fifty-four and a half billion ISK killed, twenty-three billion lost, Moros included.

Molenaar's pilots had spent much of YC125 on the other side of FL33T's killmails. His write-up came down to three points:

Call the reship faster after losing the majority of the fleet.

Subcapital logistics pilots need to step up.

Support vessels are always important; consider dual-boxing alts.

Back in lowsec, at the Uusanen infrastructure hub, Empyrean Edict of the Amarr militia headshot FL33T's fleet commanders four times in a row.

In Auga, Kanari Xadi had done it every time they met.

In March, Metropolis Daily News reported that Deepwater Hooligans had finally paid rent for Turnur. It called the deal the most important agreement of the week, the Minmatar-Hooligans Cat Agreement, and printed the terms: a daily picture of Timoxa Zero's cat for BearThatCares, "to keep those small-time industrialists in line."

For two months, Provibloc, CVA and the Providence holders around it, had fought FL33T only when FL33T came looking. On the seventeenth of March, they went looking first.

They formed in sufficient numbers and caught FL33T in KBP7-G flying a composition that did not have the answers. The evening cost twelve Cyclone Fleet Issues and nine Exequror Navy Issues. Four Huginns died with them.

BearThatCares titled his record of it with their own morale post, quoted straight back at them: "PROVIBLOC WAKES THE F*CK UP AND TEACHES MINMIL A LESSON." He included a screenshot of their internal celebration image.

I would interrupt the dank fights in Catch to let the Reddit warriors know that mid-scale content across lowsec and nullsec is absolutely raging, and we occasionally catch Ls.

FL33T had first taken a fleet into F-5FDA, in the 4YFT-F constellation of Scalding Pass, on the twenty-eighth of February. In April it went back with capitals.

The fight on the fifth of April ran five hours, and Sedition were among the pilots shooting at FL33T. Somewhere in the middle of it, FL33T killed ten dreadnoughts in one burst, most of them Naglfars and Revelations. It lost a Phoenix and a Phoenix Navy Issue of its own.

Two days later, back in the Pride of Minmatar, FL33T brought its capitals to B-WPLZ, next door to KBP7-G. This time the Naglfars were FL33T's, and eight of them died inside five minutes.

Now, capitals are expensive toys, and losing a whole wing of Naglfars? Ouch! At least we traded nicely!

Seven enemy dreadnoughts and two of their Apostles died on the same grid. The ledger for the evening came to about seventy billion ISK each way.

The flag was long gone by then. CVA had quietly taken KBP7-G back on the seventeenth of February, six weeks after it went up, and FL33T never held another system in the Pride of Minmatar. The rats kept coming back to fight there every month for the rest of YC126.