Tough little Merlin

After a good 2 nights of successful pirating, I jump into my Merlin this evening and start my thrusters. I gaze over local I see plenty of locals, I proceed to warp to one of my safe spots located in the Tasti solarsystem and hit the scanner button on my console, the display illuminates my ships cabin as I begin to scan the belts.....I see nothing. Seems pretty dead tonight, after around 45 minutes of scanning and checking the neighboring systems, I don’t seem to be finding much, so I return to Tasti and park up my ship as I get an incoming transmission from a friend. Whilst chatting with my friend, I idly continue scanning the belts when I spot a Caracal on scanner, seems this guy hasn't renamed his ship. I cut my friend short and tell him I need to go and terminate the call as I proceed to check the stats on the Caracal pilot. Appears this guy has been piloting a ship since 2005.12 - same age as myself, I don't even need to think about this one, I'm sure I can take this guy so I align my ship and hit warp......

I arrive in the belt some 30km away from the Caracal pilot, I point my ship in his direction and fire up my AB and tactical view. I don't even get within 20km before his ship aligns and warps out, good job for my tactical view, which is now pointing in his exact location. I follow the caracal to the stargate but I see nothing on my overview, I open my scanner and a quick 360 scan shows that there’s nothing around. I'm pretty sure this guy has gone back to collect his can, so I spin my ship 180 degrees and warp back to the belt at 15km and BINGO, I land right on top of him.

I target my prey and scramble him straight away and proceed to orbit him at 500m. I begin to light up his ship and tear into his shields....but wait....this is not going to be as easy pickings as I had first thought. His first volley of heavies hit me hard and I feel my ship rumble, for a moment I think I may have made a mistake in choosing my target so I switch on my invun field and proceed to battle it out. We are both neck and neck hacking away at each other, this goes on for some minutes but I’m slowly getting ahead. I was pretty sure that if we'd both hit armor at the same time it would be a sure win for the Caracal pilot, the last 15% of his shields disappear and soon enough my victim is in hull and he's still not managed to break my tank. His ship finally explodes and scatters debris through space. I don't bother locking the pod as I'm not too concerned about loosing security. I approach the wrecking to sift through the loot, 2 medium T2 extenders and a full rack of 5 advanced limos heavies, which I was satisfied with.

The Caracal pilot congratulates me in local and tells me that I have a 'tough little Merlin', I thank him and tell him it was a very good fight. Being the nice kinda guy I am, I even sold his loot back to him for 2.5 mil, well under market value because he was a good sport :)

Cleared for publication by: Ander