Negative Ten. Thrash Soldiers of Thunderstorm for Minimal Losses

A singularly brutal match saw an armor-tanking fleet from pirate corporation Negative Ten. [RED10] demolish the Proteus-centric team setup from Soldiers of Thunderstorm [SO7].

Barring an Oneiros logistics ship, Negative Ten's fleet was all about the damage. A parade of Hurricanes, Ruptures and a pair of Brutixes at mid-range to the beacon faced down Soldiers of Thunderstorm's centrally-placed squad of three Proteus, backed by two Iteron Mark Vs at mid-range and a Dominix-Guardian capacitor-transfer pairing sitting out at long range with the team's armour-boosting Damnation command ship.

The match kicked off, RED10 slammed on those micro-warpdrives and flung themselves across the distance to the beacon to pounce on those Proteuses from SO7. The Soldiers immediately plastered the strategic cruisers in a thick blanket of armour maintenance bots while Warrior and Valkyrie II drones swarmed from the Negative Ten fleet. For a few minutes, the field seemed static as fire pounded back and forth between the two sides, but Thingymawotsit, the RED10 Oneiros pilot, attended to the damage inflicted on his team with quick reflexes and solid situational awareness - essential qualities in a logistics pilot, along with placidity.

The focused fire from Negative Ten, however, was stripping through the heavy armour buffer on Valery Galaxy's Proteus faster than the repairing drone cloud could fix it, and two minutes into the match the Proteus went down, followed a moment later by DAGGER ATILLES' Rupture. NulliSecundus, a second SO7 Proteus, was the next to fall - with their Medium Armor Maintenance Bots proving ineffective, SO7's Dominix pilot, Roger Dodger, pulled them in and flung out a flight of Bouncer IIs instead, but RED10's drones were already streaking towards the Dominix and Guardian, followed by the dark, wedge-shaped Hurricane hulls and the outlandish curves of the Brutixes. Yamamoto Gonbee's Guardian vanished behind a curtain of hostile drones and moments later, the drones swept again, leaving nothing but a pile of metal and a pod floating in space behind them.

RED10's forward ships slapped the warp scramblers onto the Dominix, slowing its efforts to retreat while the majority of their firepower turned back onto the last remaining Proteus, flown by gramafon. Its death removed considerable DPS from the field and while there seemed little threat to RED10's eventual victory, to completely wipe out their opponent's fleet, they would need every whit of DPS they could muster to focus on the Damnation, so taking no risks seemed a sensible strategy. That Damnation started backing away from the scrum as it became more and more obvious how things would go. Roger Dodger's Dominix was slowly failing under the relentless pounding from guns and drones; as it fell, the RED10 ships tore off at speed to pick off the easy points embodied in the two Iteron Mark V industrials. Chukcha Lin and KAPMAKOMA both fell in seconds, and the RED10 swept round and started to close in the lone Damnation flown by Stilet.

The Damnation is a tough ship capable of a formidable passive armour tank, but it was coming under fire from two Ruptures, two Brutixes and three Hurricanes while Thingymawotsit from RED10 was so unconcerned by any damage it might do that he wandered around the field in his Oneiros cleaning out wrecks and picking up any valuable abandoned drones while his teammates finished the Damnation off.

Just over ten minutes after the start of the match, Negative Ten held the field, having completely destroyed the Soldiers of Thunderstorm team for only a single loss.