Top-Knot was a male Yautja clan leader who fought Dachande for hunt command aboard Ne'dtesei at the opening of Aliens vs. Predator, the Dark Horse series by Randy Stradley. Dachande won and took the hunt to Ryushi, while Top-Knot led his own pack to an unnamed marsh world in the issue #0 prologue. About two years later he accepted the blooded human Machiko Noguchi on Ryushi, later judged the young-blood trial in Aliens vs. Predator: Blood Time on a separate unnamed swamp, and commanded the Shell through Aliens vs. Predator: War on Bunda, his last major appearance. He is not Nat'ka'pu, the separate Leader who died on Var in Hunter's Planet, and the name is a human label for the hunter with the tied dreadlock topknot, not Machiko's hunter name Dahdtoudi.
Biography
Duel With Dachande
At the opening of Aliens vs. Predator, hunters held a live Xenomorph Queen in cables aboard ship and pulled eggs for seeding the next blooding grounds. Top-Knot fought the hunter with the lightning-bolt mark aboard Ne'dtesei, the one Machiko later called Broken Tusk and the novel Prey names Dachande, over who would lead the party and choose the hunt world. The challenge was for command of the outing, not a side quarrel. Dachande won that duel and chose the ranch world Ryushi for the blooding hunt, leaving Top-Knot to take a separate pack of his own.
Steve Perry and Stephani Perry's Prey novel starts with Dachande already Leader of the Ne'dtesei and never stages the Top-Knot duel by that name. In Prey, Dachande later duels Tichinde after the Ryushi hunt begins to go wrong, and after Ryushi the later hunt Leader Vk'leita is the one who recruits Machiko when she returns to the colony world. Top-Knot is absent from Prey entirely: he is neither the rival who loses that opening challenge nor the Leader who takes her in, so the comic is the source for the rivalry and for his later acceptance of her.
The Marsh Hunt
After the duel, Top-Knot led his own pack onto an unnamed marsh world in the issue #0 prologue collected in Omnibus Volume 1. The Yautja had seeded that ground with Xenomorphs by dropping a seeder pod, a small craft that carries Queen-laid eggs down to the surface (the pod is called a Lou-dte kalei, or "child-maker"). His hunters went out into the wetlands, tracked the creatures that hatched, and took trophies while Dachande's party went on to the separate Ryushi hunt that ended with Broken Tusk's death. This marsh hunt belongs to the time right after the duel, not to the later Blood Time trial on another unnamed swamp.
Return To Ryushi
About two years after the Prosperity Wells massacre, a Yautja ship came back to Ryushi to learn what had become of Broken Tusk's party. Machiko had lived alone on the ranch world all that time, and as the hunters moved through the rock canyons she stepped out over a freshly killed Xenomorph, armored and armed, and asked if she could tag along. She had just saved one of the unblooded hunters from that creature, so the party could not simply cut her down.
The hunters closed around her with spears and casters raised, and she bet everything on Broken Tusk's "going away present" carrying weight. Top-Knot stepped forward, studied the blooding mark Broken Tusk had burned onto her forehead, and accepted her into the clan. From then on she hunted under his word aboard the mother ship later called the Shell. In the Prey novel the Leader Vk'leita recruits her instead, so Top-Knot is absent from that book.
The Swamp Trial
In Aliens vs. Predator: Blood Time, the eight-page 1994 story by Randy Stradley and Phill Norwood, Top-Knot led ten young bloods into an unnamed swamp for their blooding. That initiation swamp is a later hunt, separate from the Omnibus #0 marsh he had led right after the duel with Dachande. The prey on that ground was the most dangerous their tribe had found, and a single kill there was worth more than twenty lesser trophies. Failure on that hunt almost always meant death.
After two days of wading, Two-Stripes grew impatient and believed their guide had lost the trail. Light-Stepper heard clicking ahead and showed that the trail lay right in front of them. The first sign of prey was a torn flying reptile under the trees, with a broken spear and a burn from Xenomorph acid beside it. Light-Stepper reached the body first, but Two-Stripes knocked him aside and claimed the discovery, and Top-Knot let that claim stand. When the Xenomorphs struck, Light-Stepper killed an adult Xenomorph with his spear and lost his right hand to its acid, and Two-Stripes stole the head and carried it back toward the Leader as his own kill.
Judgment Of Two-Stripes
Other hunters brought Light-Stepper back alive, held up between them with acid still dripping from his arm, and the cheat was exposed. Top-Knot, a veteran of many hunts whose word was law, rejected the false claim. The party stripped Two-Stripes of armor and weapons, tied him to a tree, and left him for the creatures as the ship lifted off. Two-Stripes was remembered as a bad blood. Light-Stepper was blooded on his kill and later returned among Top-Knot's people before the Bunda hunt.
Queen Capture
Aliens vs. Predator: War and S. D. Perry's 1999 novel open with Topknot as Leader of the Shell on a live Queen hunt. He ran point, signed the prepare command, and led the pyramid of hunters into the marsh hive under ship cover fire. Ritual weapon-matching was suspended for that capture. When the Queen was roped, he cut her free of the egg sac with a long blade the novel calls an h'sai-de. Three-Spot, one of his Blooded, lost his rope and died when the Queen drove her claws through his chest.
Machiko left her post, caught the loose rein, and held the Queen until others took the rope. Top-Knot slammed her to the ground for abandoning her place, then put her on advance guard for the haul back. His briefing had warned that boarding a captive Queen was the most dangerous part of any capture. At the ramp he called for the dock to close, and in Perry's novel his victory sign locked Machiko in the hold with the Queen when Shorty sealed her path, and she escaped up an air shaft on her own. David Bischoff's Hunter's Planet stages a Top Knot Queen capture with Three-Spot and Shorty only as former-pack flashback and backstory during Machiko's years with him, not as present-day action on Blior, and that book separately kills Nat'ka'pu on Var.
Year On The Shell
Comic and novel keep Machiko with Top-Knot's clan for about a year after Ryushi. Unblooded students crowded her, and Shorty mocked her from the rear of the line until she saved his life and paid for the insult in standing. When the scarred hunter with the Colonial Marine banner on his stump docked with the clan before Bunda, the pack crowded him the way it crowded only a figure of Top-Knot's weight, and Machiko recognized Light-Stepper and lost more standing when she reached for the human cloth.
Top-Knot walked her to the kehrite and named Shorty as her opponent, handing her a mask because a human skull is thin beside a Yautja one. Shorty threw her off the floor, the clan roared for him, and she lost the pit fight and her place on the Bunda drop. She remained on the ship while the rest of the party went down to the jungle.
Bunda And The Break
Hunt ships from several clans gathered above Bunda, and Top-Knot took his party down into the jungle while the captive Queen stayed locked aboard the Shell for the hunt to come. Machiko, barred from the drop after losing to Shorty in the kehrite, watched the hunt from the ship. When the hunters turned from Xenomorphs to the humans of the Weyland-Yutani survey station Big Archey, her loyalty to the clan broke. She killed the hunters at the console, unlocked the Queen, and flew the Shell toward Top-Knot's signal and the fire on the station.
The theft cost Top-Knot his ship and his prize, and left his clan stranded on a world filling with the Queen's brood. Machiko joined the human survivors, killed Shorty in the jungle, and left the planet while Top-Knot was still in the field with what remained of his hunters. He never got his rebel student back, and S. D. Perry's novel makes clear that Topknot lived through it. That Bunda hunt is his last major appearance, and after War he basically does not appear again as an active Leader.
Weapons And Armor
Top-Knot fought with a spear or glaive in the swamp trial and carried the golden sword used to sever a Queen's egg sac on the capture hunt. On Queen work and ship defense he ordered plasma and burners when ritual limits were lifted. His clan wore the heavy plate over mesh that later pages associate with Top Knot's hunters and with Machiko's fitted armor on hive assaults. The tied topknot that gave him his human name set him apart from other Leaders on the page, including the separate novel Leader Nat'ka'pu.
Conclusion
Top-Knot lost the duel that put Dachande over the Ryushi hunt, led his own pack on the unnamed Omnibus #0 marsh, accepted Machiko on Ryushi, blooded Light-Stepper, marooned Two-Stripes, struck Machiko for leaving her post, and still stood in Bunda's jungle when she stole his ship and walked back to her own kind. Across the comics from the 1990 series through Blood Time and War, and in the Queen-capture flashback of Hunter's Planet, he is one of the few named Yautja Leaders who recurs, and War remains the last major story in which he appears.
Appearances
- Aliens vs. Predator (1989–1990 comic / Omnibus #0) - duel with Dachande; unnamed marsh pack
- Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special epilogue (1991) - return to Ryushi; accepts Machiko
- Aliens vs. Predator: Blood Time (1994) - later swamp blooding; judges Two-Stripes
- Aliens vs. Predator: War (1995 comic) - Shell Leader; Queen capture; Bunda
- Aliens vs. Predator: Hunter's Planet (1994 novel) - Top Knot Queen-capture flashback / former pack Leader only (not Nat'ka'pu; not present-day Blior)
- Aliens vs. Predator: War (1999 novel) - Topknot on the Shell and Bunda; survives
Tag Categories: Individual Predators | Predators From The Comics | Predators From The Novels | Yautja Leaders | Predators Who Survived | Predator Lore
