Hadrian Corto

Overview
Hadrian features powerful defensive tactics, Cooldown Meter manipulation, and overall balanced stats. His robot engineering skills manifest with the unique ability to permanently gain extra mobility and abilities by removing cards from the game.

Backstory
The monstrous, robotic creature that would later be known as the "Sky King" destroyed every spaceport, shuttle, and antennae on Aegis’ surface, severing the colony from contact with the Earth-Luna-Mars Alliance (ELM). Every attempt to break atmosphere by the colonists was thwarted; the construction sites of new escape ships were devoured whole, the remnants vomited out as burning spheres of scrap towards the unfortunate surface. Every cache of advanced technology was targeted, devoured and destroyed. Within a decade, the broken people of Aegis had devoted themselves to the fear and worship of the creature, for "Those who have wed themselves to steel are lost. Keep your hands free from the toil of mechanism, heed the signs, and you will find a guardian in the skies.”

Hadrian Corto wasn’t raised among these fallen technophobes. They were caring, kind folk, but he and his mother were outsiders. She was a brilliant roboticist, who refused to abandon her work, terrifying the neighboring villages. Hadrian and his mother had no choice but to turn her underground workshop into their home. Though they traded provisions with the luddites, they created technology, threatening to invoke the wrath of the Sky King.

When the Sky King would enter within range of their sensors, Hadrian’s mother would study it from the safety of her workshop. Hadrian would watch her gaze trace the Sky King’s path through the clouds. Each time, she tightly gripped her chest before racing to document new observations on its movement.

The attack changed everything. While Hadrian searched through exiled components from the village, the Sky King’s monstrous silhouette descended. As he ran in terror, it vomited forth a burning sphere. His left arm was reduced to cinders. Hadrian’s mother barely found him in time.

His mother designed a cybernetic prosthesis to replace his lost arm, but she was missing a few key components. Exhausting their resources, they turned to the very sphere that took Hadrian’s arm. Prying it apart piece by piece, they were able to salvage what they needed, but when they cracked open the sphere's core they found a gnarled mass of human remains in its center. The Sky King wasn’t only consuming technology.

Hadrian and his mother tried to warn the villages of this new danger, but the debased colonists were too paralyzed by fear of Hadrian’s cybernetic appendage to listen. They realized that if they were to defy the Sky King, they would fight it alone.

Hadrian’s training in the robotics intensified. He flourished, taking to his mother’s teachings with an unnatural level of comprehension and skill. Before long, Hadrian surpassed her, independently designing robots that could be controlled directly through his prosthesis. Meanwhile, Hadrian’s mother used her years of notes and observations to create a device that could track the Sky King. When she first turned it on though, it pointed towards two sites. One was kilometers away, one was in their own home. She revealed that the device was tracking the Sky King by locating Giga-Shards—an incredible source of energy that powered the Sky King’s gigantic frame—and that she had one inside of her as well.

The shards were grown within kidnapped humans and then lethally harvested by the Zoider Armada, to power their galaxy conquering war machines. Before Hadrian was born she and her fellow prisoners had managed to escape and reach Aegis. It wasn’t long after that the Sky King came to haunt and devastate the world. She alone understood that its goal was to isolate the escapees, destroying their technology and hunting them for their shards. And though she had been able to slow the shard’s growth, it couldn’t be stopped. Any attempt to remove it would take her life.

Hadrian couldn’t accept this. He experimented in building a way to safely hold the shard within her, theorizing that a cybernetic implant, similar to his own prosthesis, would be the best solution. He used his arm as a testbed, improving on his mother’s design, and cultivating a dangerous host of augmentations designed to channel the shard’s power. She watched him lose himself to his obsession, emerging from weeks of seclusion with the cybernetics of his arm expanding over more and more of his body.

The last time Hadrian emerged from this work, his mother called out to him, softly. She had removed the Giga-Shard from her own body. The shard was the only thing powerful enough to give Hadrian a chance to escape the Sky King. The human race needed a mind as brilliant as his if it was going to survive the Zoider war to come. It was his obligation to escape—to carve a path towards Earth and warn humanity.

For years, he scoured Aegis, salvaging every last scrap of tech left on or beneath its battered surface. He formed these scraps into a titanic robot designed for battle. He knew that the moment he powered it with the Giga-shard, the Sky King would sense his location and come for him, but it wouldn’t know that he was prepared, that he was waiting. He mounted the Giga-Shard tracker to his cockpit, and installed the shard into his cybernetic arm. As it activated, the explosive power of the alien device coursed through his being and connected him directly with his robot's frame. Barely able to contain it, he rocketed his robot upwards, breaking through Aegis’ surface and burying the workshop.

The tracker showed the Sky King changing course, heading directly toward him. When it appeared on the horizon, Hadrian’s careful strategy disintegrated into a blind rage, surging power through his robot’s chassis. He shot forward and collided with the Sky King, its giant maw ripping into his scrap-armor panels, driving the monstrosity upwards, sending them both hurtling beyond Aegis’ atmosphere. He furiously rained strike after strike into the Sky King, but its power was overwhelming. Hadrian was forced to eject. He looked out of the cockpit window and locked eyes with the wounded Sky King, holding its gaze while his pod drifted slowly towards Earth.

As he entered the Terran atmosphere, Hadrian was able to modify the ejection system on his cockpit, gaining control of his propulsion and direction, guiding himself safely to the surface. As he closed in, the shard tracker lit up, pinging multiple locations across the planet.

The power of one Giga-Shard had debilitated the monster. Once he had more, he would destroy the Sky King utterly.

Playstyle
Hadrian is all about maneuverability, disruption, and defense. His deck provides 3 ways to directly remove Trauma Tokens, and 1 card, Reboot, which allows you to clear all cards and tokens from your Cooldown Meter, if you skip a turn. Backfire lets you nullify incoming ranged attack damage, and his ability Wasteland Mechanic let's you remove 1/2 of your cards from the game to regain 1/4 of your robot's Max Armor, giving Hadrian the most comprehensive suite of defenses in Giga-Robo.

Cards like Re-Chamber, which allow you to place a card directly into cooldown Activated, and  Neural Link Disrupt, which forces your opponent to replace a newly played card with a randomly selected one, are perfect for upsetting an opponents rhythm.

Hadrian's other abilities, Improvise Through Sacrifice and Wed to Steel, further illustrate Hadrian's background as an engineer, by essentially redirecting your robot's weapons systems to defense and mobility. Both can be used defensively, taking you out of melee range and quickly finding cover, or used to close the distance with your opponent for sudden offensive rushes.

Manage the card removal from his abilities well, and Hadrian can provide you with the tools and skills needed to weather any offense.

Tips and Tricks
Have you flown as Hadrian Corto? Noticed any nifty rules interactions? Post them here!

Trivia

 * The art for Nerves of Steel depicts glowing circuitry around Hadrian's eye that is very similar to the lines that manifest on Dash.

Rules Clarifications
Rules clarifications for Hadrian's abilities will go here.