In February, INN reported Triumvirate’s (TRI) decision to withdraw from their home in Insmother after seven months of conflict with Drone Region Federation (DRF). At the time, they declared their intent to wage an assymetric guerilla war, but always with an eye toward a return.

We may have seen the opening salvoes of the conflict’s next stage on Sunday, May 6, as supercap fleets led by TRI and DRF’s primary alliance XxDEATHxX (XiX) faced off over an armor Fortizar timer in Insmother’s LVL-GZ system.

The outcome of the 600 Billion ISK engagement was mixed. TRI lost the armor timer objective, but XiX lost the ISK war. Nevertheless, TRI FC and Alliance Executive Garst Tyrell said his side was happy with the outcome because they were able to use their supercap fleet to force XiX to commit, rather than standing down as has been their routine lately.

Garst called the battle “slightly rushed,” and noted that his side was fighting a midpoint away from home, while XiX was able to simply undock from the local keepstar and cyno over. Still, he noted some mistakes by XiX which left their dreadnoughts spread out and vulnerable. The result was a loss of 66 dreadnoughts and 34 carriers for the XiX-led coalition, to 40 dreadnoughts lost by TRI’s side, according to zkillboard.

Ultimately, the outcome hinged on the fighter war, which TRI lost. XiX left the fight down 90 Heavy, 209 Light, and 7 Support Fighters, while TRI lost 143 Heavy, 529 Light, and 23 Support Fighters . By the end of it, TRI was left 400km off the Fortizar, with XiX sitting at zero tethered up. Ultimately, TRI decided to leave the field since there were no longer any targets left to fight over.

This, Garst noted, is just the beginning. “Tri is back after our post-Insmother loss hiatus.” He said. “We are on a full war footing doing fleets like this daily, and we will be taking back Insmother and putting the nail in DRF’s coffin after over a year of fighting with them across the south and east.”

Garst reinforced the message with one he shared with his troops upon the initial decision to abandon Insmother, “we are going to finish what they started by taking them down once and for all, to break up their coalition and reclaim our Insmother home.”

This seems a fitting bookend to TRI’s initial retreat, during which Garst observed that “without conflict (between the loose array of large coalition partners aligned against them at the time), the game becomes stale.” Now, it seems, he and the rest of the Triumvirate seek to put action behind those words, and to demonstrate that for them it is anything but.

For today at least, independent of the outcome from this particular engagement, they succeeded in doing just that.