A Hurricane Opens the Bill at 02:06
The first confirmed loss was a Hurricane belonging to Southern Cross Monopoly. As openings to a capital brawl go, it is an unglamorous one: a battlecruiser, cheap, disposable, and thoroughly outclassed by almost everything that followed it into the same system. Fights rarely start at their own final scale. Something got tackled, someone answered, and the answer escalated well past whatever the first pilots in Local had budgeted for. By 02:20, with 82 pilots having passed through the system and 43 ships on the ledger, the whole thing was over.
Then the Dreadnoughts Started Dying
Eight capital hulls were destroyed in V2-GZS. Four of them account for almost the entire invoice. A Revelation Navy Issue, the faction variant of the Amarr dreadnought, went down at 18.7 billion ISK - close to a third of the engagement's total value in a single hull. A Naglfar Fleet Issue, its Minmatar counterpart, followed at 14.2 billion. A standard Revelation at 8.9 billion. A Ninazu at 5.9 billion. Between the two faction dreadnoughts alone, roughly 33 billion ISK was erased, nearly 58 percent of everything destroyed in the fight, by two ships. The other 39 losses in the system - frigates, cruisers, battleships, pods and whatever else got caught in the same gravity well - add up to a little over 9 billion between them. The capitals were the story, and they were the bill.
When the Ninazu Goes, Nothing Holds
The Ninazu is the quiet entry on that list and possibly the most consequential. A force auxiliary is capital-scale logistics: the ship that keeps dreadnoughts upright while they cycle their weapons, and the thing pilots quietly assume will still be there when things get bad. Its presence among the losses means at least one capital repair platform did not survive the engagement, and capital fights have a habit of turning very quickly once that safety net is gone. Ships that were being held together stop being held together. Given that eight capitals died inside a quarter of an hour, whatever was trying to hold the line in V2-GZS was not doing so for long.
Two Ledgers, Both Bloody
Read the two sides of this fight side by side and it looks like two different battles. Southern Cross Monopoly is credited with 10 kills and charged with 7 losses. Evermore Warriors carries 3 kills and the heaviest loss column on the field with 10. Southern Cross Silver Shields added another 10 kills, SCI Zenith 6, and DickBucket Deliveries 3. On the receiving end, alongside Monopoly and Evermore, sit Hounds of War. with 5 losses, and Enemy of Man and Weaponised Vegemite with 2 each. Not every loss is attributed to a listed organisation, which is its own hint that this was not a neat two-fleet engagement fought across a tidy line. It reads like a brawl that grew extra participants while it was already running - the kind where pilots check the overview, see three colours they did not expect, and make a decision in the space of a second.
A Capsule Closes the Book at 02:20
The last confirmed loss was a pod belonging to Hounds of War. - the pilot, the final thing left after the ship breaks, and the closing entry in a 43-ship ledger. No structures appear among the losses and no supercapitals were committed, so this was a ship fight in the purest sense: hulls traded against hulls until one side ran out of appetite. Clovis Geass is credited as the engagement's top damage dealer, which is a line worth having on a résumé after a fight this short. Whoever was flying the Revelation Navy Issue will remember V2-GZS rather differently. Fifteen minutes is not much time, but it is more than enough to remove 57 billion ISK from circulation and to remind everyone who flew a capital into that system exactly what they were risking when they undocked it. Rebuilding eight capitals - two of them faction hulls - takes considerably longer than the fight that killed them.
