Night of the living yolo

A few hours after we went up against SSC, I was exploring the WH chain with my new corpies in Hard Knocks. There were a lot of wormholes and not a huge amount of explorers, so we were just slowly kind of making our way down the pipe, looking for whatever content we could find that was tucked away in the nooks and crannies of w-space. All was quiet until someone said, excitedly, "Orca is yoloing a C3!"

The hole in question was an M267, which can be closed quite easily by a single orca making two roundtrips. This particular orca pilot lived in a 5/3 and was cycling through his static, possibly looking for a highsec exit. Our scout noticed that the orca didn't seem to be scouting his own statics, he was just scanning and crashing each one without sending a covops through. I shot down the chain in an inty fitted with 3 points of tackle, enough to counter two stabs. I was very hopeful as it had been years since I'd been rewarded with an elusive orca kill.

When I arrived, several corpies were already engaged with the orca, and more were following behind me. The problem wasn't killing the orca, as we had enough dps and tackle to slowly erode his EHP, but rather that we had caught him on his second trip through, and he was trying to re-enter the WH before his imminent death. It wouldn't have been enough mass to close the WH, but he was gambling that the WH would go full mass crit and we would disengage to avoid trapping ourselves by pursuing, giving him enough time to warp off and maybe survive. Everyone with a mwd furiously tried to bump him away from the WH, but he was able to enter. Unwilling to let him go, I jumped after him, as did one of our scouty tengus and a machariel, of all things.

As expected, the WH didn't die. It trolled the orca by staying full mass crit after the machariel entered. The orca decloaked and I held him while the mach pushed him away from the WH and we finally killed him. We got his pod too, which was worth almost as much as the ship. We scanned out some BMs just in case, and then I went back through the WH - no change. The tengu, however, closed it. That means that after the machariel had yolo'd after the orca, there was less than 10m kg of mass remaining. No problem for me, but our mach was faced with 10 jumps through null to get to highsec. Amazingly he did so (brass balls and all) and survived, and no one even tried to point him, much to his disappointment.