The three-mandibled Predator was a Yautja hunter who killed an Astar Industries survey crew on the jungle planet Damara in 2041. Among its victims were Hugo and Francesca Berwick, and the loss of a tusk to Francesca's blade left it with only three mandibles. Their daughter Theta Berwick survived the massacre and spent fifteen years hunting its kind in search of the scarred killer. It appeared in Predator: Day of the Hunter, where it boarded the Astar ship Turnstone in 2056 and finally died at Theta's hands.
Biography
Massacre On Damara
In 2041 the Predator came to Damara, where a team from Astar Industries was surveying the jungle from the research ship Sandpiper. It stalked the settlement from the trees and opened the attack with a plasma bolt that struck Hugo Berwick in front of his wife and daughter. The crew fired blindly into the jungle, but the hunter stayed hidden and picked them off one by one. Theta later remembered its ship landing in the tall grass and the creature walking out of the light, and she said that it destroyed everything she cared about and everything she loved.
The Severed Mandible
Francesca Berwick fled back aboard the Sandpiper with Theta and told her daughter to hide while the ship's computer prepared to fly. The Predator followed them aboard, hissing as it lifted Francesca off the floor by her throat, and she told it that it had killed her husband. She slashed its face with a blade and cut away its lower left mandible in a spray of green blood. The wound only enraged the hunter, and it killed her in front of her daughter before Sandy carried the girl away as the last survivor of the crew.
The attack left Theta broken and alone, with a lifetime of nightmares about the creature's dead-dog smell and its screams. The missing tusk became the one mark by which she could tell her parents' killer apart from the rest of its kind. For fifteen years she hunted Predators across the galaxy, checking the mandibles of every hunter she killed, and in 2056 she shouted in anger on the planet XI4432-8 when her latest kill still had all four. The three-mandibled Predator went on hunting through those years, unaware that the girl it had spared was following its trail.
The Hunt On Tusket
By 2056 the Predators had marked the Sandpiper as an Astar ship and were searching the outposts of the ice planet Tusket for it. Theta crashed there and killed one hunter at Port Medway and another in a duel on the ice, until soldiers from the Astar recon ship Turnstone took her prisoner. The three-mandibled Predator came after the ship in turn, following the trail of its dead kin. It cloaked itself and slipped aboard the Turnstone, then began killing the soldiers one by one in the corridors while the crew argued over what to do with their prisoner.
Attack On The Turnstone
Theta offered to act as bait in the cargo bay, but the hunter sent a spider-legged drone in its place, and the explosion killed many of the crew. Captain Ferrier blamed Theta for leading the hunters to his ship and struck her, and then the Predator walked out of the flames and impaled him on its wrist blades. The blast tore through the hangar and threw the surviving soldiers across the deck. The hunter used the confusion to close in, cutting down the crew one by one until only Theta, the science officer and a handful of others were left alive.
Duel With Theta
The Predator overpowered Theta and left her beaten in the burning wreckage. In a daze she saw her mother and father before her, told them she was sorry and admitted that she had failed them both as her blade slipped from her hand. The hunter hissed as it removed its bio-mask, and she knew the scarred face at once. It was her father's killer, the monster that had murdered her mother in front of her and left her to live with the pain, and it answered her whispered recognition with a roar.
The science officer Paolo Silva opened fire on the unmasked hunter, and it turned on him and fired back with plasma. Theta called it back, shouting that she was the one it wanted and that she had been killing its kind just to find it. She struck it with plasma fire of her own, telling it how she had spent fifteen years trudging from planet to planet, searching every hunting ground and following the trail of its destruction. The Predator fought back with its wrist blades, but each exchange drove it further back across the ground.
Final Fate
Theta closed in with her blades and drove them into the Predator again and again, telling it that everything had been for this moment. She ran it through with a final blow and stood over the corpse covered in its green blood, ending the hunt that had begun on Damara in 2041. Standing beside Paolo, she said that there were more of the creatures out there, perhaps hundreds, thousands or even millions, and that they were still hunting. She vowed to find them all, and the two of them walked away from the body into the snow.
Personality & Traits
The three-mandibled Predator was a patient and merciless stalker that preferred to strike from hiding before closing in for the kill. On Damara it shot Hugo Berwick from the trees and then followed the survivors aboard their own ship, and on the Turnstone it used a drone to kill soldiers before showing itself. It showed no restraint toward people who were not armed, killing Francesca after she had already wounded it. Yet it left the young Theta alive, a choice that cost it its life fifteen years later.
The hunter carried the scar of its first defeat for the rest of its life, and the missing lower mandible gave its face a lopsided snarl. It removed its mask before the final duel and roared at Theta, a gesture that Predators often made before facing worthy prey. Whether it remembered the girl from Damara was never revealed in the story. Its savagery made it the defining monster of Theta's life, and her nightmares cast it as the shape of every fear she carried.
Equipment
The three-mandibled Predator wore heavy spiked armor and a bio-mask, and it used a cloak to move unseen through the jungle of Damara and the corridors of the Turnstone. It fired a plasma weapon from cover during the first attack, the same kind of shoulder cannon its kind used across the galaxy. In close combat it relied on long wrist blades, which it used to impale Captain Ferrier. It also arrived on Damara in its own ship, which landed in the tall grass near the survey camp.
During the attack on the Turnstone it deployed a spider-legged drone that walked into the cargo bay in place of the hunter and exploded among the soldiers. The trick showed that it understood human tactics well enough to see through Theta's plan to use herself as bait. Its gear was much like the armor Theta had stripped from her own kills, since she had built her suit from the equipment of hunters of the same kind. In the end none of these weapons saved it from the human who had learned to fight like a Predator.
Behind The Scenes
The three-mandibled Predator was created by writer Ed Brisson and artist Kev Walker for Marvel's Predator series, which launched on August 10, 2022. The story of its first attack was told through scattered flashbacks across the six issues, from Theta's memories on XI4432-8 to her nightmares on Tusket and the full scene of Francesca's death. The character was never given a name in the comics and was known only by its missing tusk. Leinil Francis Yu drew the snarling Predator #6 cover that showed its face with green blood dripping from its jaws.
The six issues were collected as Predator by Ed Brisson Vol. 1, subtitled Day of the Hunter, in 2023. The hunter's death closed the revenge story of the first series, and the later series The Preserve and The Last Hunt moved Theta's goal toward rescuing the humans the Predators kept in stasis. The killer's death was the first step in a much larger war that later carried Theta to the Game Preserve Planet and a duel with a Super Predator. Its design followed the classic look of the 1987 film's hunter, with long dreadlocks and a heavy mask.
Appearances
- Predator: Day of the Hunter (2022 to 2023)
Tag Categories: Marvel Predators | Individual Predators | Predators From The Comics | Predator Deaths | Predator Lore
