The Sky Devil Predator was a lone Yautja hunter who fought Superman in Superman vs. Predator, the 2000 crossover by David Michelinie and Alex Maleev. He came to Central America to destroy an alien derelict whose virus was draining Superman's powers. He then killed the mercenary leader Nigel Skane and the scientist Solomon Ward, and fought the weakened Superman inside Ward's Mayan fortress. After a brief alliance with Superman, he destroyed Ward's machine with his self-destruct device and left behind a vial that restored Superman's strength.
Biography
The Legend Of The Devil Warrior
The name Sky Devil comes from a legend that the guide Machu told the S.T.A.R. Labs expedition in La Jungla de las Sombras. Years earlier, foreign soldiers had fought a secret war in the jungle, and a devil warrior dropped from the sky to hunt them, taking trophies of blood and bone. One soldier finally beat the monster, which called fire down from hell to consume its own body and left a fused pit behind. The xenobiologist Casey Trabor recognized the hellfire as a self-destruct, and he realized that a broken wire had stopped the alien ship in the jungle from blowing up as well.
The derelict woke when Superman forced its hatch open and a compressed micro-burst of sound hit him. Far out in space, a ship picked up the signal, and a smaller craft broke away from it and headed for Earth. It landed in the jungle at night, and the hunter it carried stepped out into the dark. Using his cloak, he watched unseen as Ward's mercenaries, led by Nigel Skane, captured Superman, Lois Lane and the expedition and marched them to a hidden fortress under a mountain. Trabor later suspected that the hunter had been sent to retrieve or remove the old ship because it had failed to destroy itself.
Destruction Of The Derelict
Solomon Ward sent a team of mercenaries back to the clearing to strip more devices from the alien ship, and none of them returned. The hunter cut them down beside the derelict with his wristblades and then decloaked over their bodies. When Superman came back alone to search the ship for a cure, he found only shredded fatigues and three fresh skulls where the guards had been. A booby trap then exploded in his face, and the hunter stepped out beside the ship, folding away his gun and extending his blades to fight him by hand.
Superman punched the hunter, who answered with his shoulder cannon. Superman tried to draw him into the cramped ship, where the cannon would be harder to use, but the hunter ran instead. Inside, Superman saw alien symbols changing in sequence on a console, and he flew out just before the derelict exploded and took any cure with it. Later, while Superman fought off Skane's men in the crater, the hunter watched him from the trees on a holographic display. He played back a recorded human voice that asked whether the sniffles had got Superman down.
Hunting Ward's Mercenaries
After Superman wrecked the communications dish at the fortress, Skane decided that the damage looked like the work of a trained soldier and went looking for a partner. He found the hunter in the motor pool, where the creature was tearing through his men. The Predator threw his smart disc and repeated the mercenaries' own words back to them in their voices as he killed them. He then blew up a fuel tanker with his shoulder cannon and burst out through the blast door, and Skane was left certain that the hunter would come back.
The hunter's ship was hidden in a smaller cavern miles from the mountain, and he returned there to prepare for the last stage of the hunt against Superman. A wall inside the ship held skulls taken as trophies, and he chose his weapons from a rack beside them. The narration described a warrior's code in which survival was an option but failure was not. He took up his telescoping spear and returned to Ward's fortress after the machine at the top of the pyramid had fired its first beam into the sky.
The Final Hunt
Skane caught Trabor and used him as bait, but the hunter came for the mercenary leader himself. Skane challenged him to put away his advanced weapons and fight by a warrior's code, and the hunter met him at close range with a blade. He cut Skane, but the mercenary kicked him down and moved in to finish him with a knife. The wristblades then shot out and killed Skane before he could strike. Ward was abandoned by his remaining men soon after, and he went on calling for Skane without knowing that he was dead.
Inside the fortress, the hunter found Superman, who caught the returning disc in a stone wall and took a blast from the shoulder cannon. Superman then fired his heat vision into the hunter's mask with all the strength he had left. The hunter answered with a blade across Superman's body, and the bleeding Kryptonian believed he was about to die. Unable to win on strength, Superman punched the ancient wall beside him until the roof of the ruin came down on the hunter. He dragged the pinned Predator from the rubble and locked him in a cell, bending the bars shut behind him.
Alliance With Superman
Trabor reached Superman and pointed out that Ward's seeding machine was active and that only the hunter might be able to stop it. The machine was meant to spread a mutagen through the rain that would kill people with genetic conditions, and hundreds of thousands would die if it ran. Superman bent the bars open again, and for a moment the Kryptonian, the human and the hunter faced each other in silence before they reached an understanding. It was one of the rare Predator team-ups with humans and their allies in the comics.
At the generator pit, Solomon Ward drove a jeep into Superman and swore that nobody would stop his project. The hunter threw his disc, and it killed Ward in the driver's seat. The seeding beam was firing by then, and Trabor feared that they were too late to stop it. The Predator keyed his wrist computer, and Superman recognized the same beeping he had heard on the derelict before it exploded. Superman concluded that the hunter had chosen to destroy the machine himself, since that also stopped evidence of his race from falling into human hands.
Death In The Mountain
The hunter stayed beside the generator while Superman and Trabor ran for the tunnel. His self-destruct device tore the mountain apart, and it collapsed into a crater with the hunter and Ward's machine inside. In the smaller cavern miles away, the automated destruct circuits aboard his ship destroyed it as well. The blast vaporized the mutagen, which ended Ward's plan to change the human race. The hunter left only one thing behind, a vial of liquid that could have been either a cure or a poison.
Superman reasoned that the hunter had been vicious but never devious, and he drank the vial while Trabor watched. He began to recover as soon as he swallowed it, and days later in Metropolis he told Lois that he was almost back to full strength. Lois could not understand why the monster that had nearly killed him had saved his life in the end. Superman guessed that the hunter had seen him as a worthy opponent, in keeping with the hunter's sense of honor.
Weapons And Equipment
The hunter carried the usual close-combat kit of a Yautja, with retractable wristblades on his forearms and a shoulder cannon for ranged attacks. His smart disc returned after a throw, and he used it against the mercenaries in the motor pool and later against Ward. For the final hunt he added a telescoping spear, which he carried fully extended. His cloak let him follow the S.T.A.R. Labs group and Ward's men without being seen, and he only showed himself when he chose to fight.
The hunter could record human voices and play them back, and he used the words of the mercenaries and of Superman against them during the hunt. He watched his prey from cover on a holographic display. His wrist computer controlled a self-destruct device powerful enough to bring down a mountain, and his ship carried its own automated destruct circuits. Under his armor he wore the usual mesh netting, with a small skull hanging from a cord around his neck, and his bio-mask covered his face throughout the story.
Conclusion
The Sky Devil Predator came to Central America to destroy an alien derelict, and he left a trail of dead mercenaries behind him, among them Nigel Skane and Solomon Ward. He nearly killed a sick Superman before the two worked together to stop Ward's machine. He died in his own self-destruct blast inside the mountain, and the vial he left behind saved Superman's life. Superman met the hunters again in JLA vs. Predator, part of his long rivalry with the Predators.
Appearances
- Superman vs. Predator #1-3 (DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics, 2000)
Tag Categories: Individual Predators | Predators From The Comics | Predator Deaths | Alien And Predator Crossovers | Predator Lore
