For the second time in a day, Renato was regretting not making his environmentally safe supersuit, he sweated and panted heavily in the blistering heat as the force guided him across a trek through the beautiful but deadly landscape of Mustafar.

As the local guards of the techno union weren't expecting anyone to come to the planet anytime soon, they were pretty lax on their guard duty. Renato's foresight in coming out of hyperspace further away than a regular ship would arrive also played a key role in getting their ship onto the planet undetected.

From here on out, however, he had to improvise in his search for HK-47. He had remembered that the place where HK-47's ship was on an island and it had a volcano and that the ship he had been in was a hammerhead cruiser.

So, he kept that image in his mind and gently prodded the force to give him directions to reach his destination. That was six hours ago, and since then Renato had travelled at least 100 miles of rocky terrain, lava rivers, and occasional water bodies from the time he left his ship.

At least according to the force, he was in the vicinity of the ship because he had used the same trick before landing to land as close as possible to make the search easier on him. Just as he was about to give up for today and continue from the same place tomorrow, Renato reached the island-like structure.

As he walked onto the island, he instinctively used Psychometry and saw the vision of a ship crash and knew he had arrived at the right place. Using the commlink in his helmet, he sent a beacon to his ship.

It only took a few minutes for the ship to come to him. One of the reasons he had travelled on foot instead of searching from the sky was that there would be fewer chances of detection. No matter how lucky Renato was, he wouldn't bet on the fact that him constantly zooming around the planet with his 800 m frigate he would be undetected.

Now that the ship was here though, Renato started excavating the hammerhead cruiser with the help of the tractor beam on his ship. It was a very inefficient method because of the fact that tractor beams use up lots of energy, he continued the course of action however because he didn't need to completely excavate the full ship.

Just a large enough area so that he and the huragoks could enter and patch the ship up. From the psychometry, he knew that the ship was mostly intact and only ever crashed due to its power system getting completely busted by an ion cannon while it was in the gravity of the planet.

Eventually, they evacuated a tunnel to the ship. Before going in however Renato gave explicit orders to the huragoks to not turn anything on in the ship while they work on it.

He didn't need them accidentally awakening HK and having the droid go on a killing spree and killing the only few huragoks he had. As they entered the ship, Renato started exploring the ship with extreme enthusiasm as the hammerhead cruiser was one of his favourite ships of the Star Wars verse.

Exploring and walking around the ship, he found HK-47 at the front end of the ship flat against the wall. One of the reasons he wanted to find HK was the fact he was considered the pinnacle of droid engineering during Revan's time which was debatable but he was definitely the pinnacle of humanoid droids.

He wanted to study the technology that went into making HK. Satisfied that he found the droid, Renato took the droid and hefted it up onto his shoulder as he carried it to Brad (bounces-randomly) the huragok.

"Hey Brad, can you do your magic on this droid? Also, after you are done, can you transfer all of your analysis onto this datapad, please."

Brad just waved his cilia to show that he accepted the instruction and then proceeded to do a teardown on the HK-47 body. Within 15 secs, however, the droid was back to looking complete and Brad took the datapad from Renato's hand and connected his cilia for a second and then gave it back to him and went back to his work on the ship.

Now that he had completed the main objective here, he decided to take HK-47 up to his ship and study the dissection of the droid and its programming in the comforts of his cold and comfy quarters.

As he entered the ship Renato spoke out loud knowing that Paddy could hear clearly.

"Hey Paddy, now that we have the space and the materials, I was thinking of cannibalising both the Hammerhead cruiser and this frigate to design a new ship. It will probably take a lot of time to design it but it doesn't have to be immediate.

In the meantime, I want you to make a list of things that need to be on the new ship. You know me well enough that you can add things I too would like. Just give me a chance to look over it once you are done so that I can see if I want to make any more changes."

Back in his room, Renato slowly tried to get an understanding of the working of HK piece by piece.

By the time he finished going through the data and understanding all the design details that took place in HK's construction, Renato was amazed and even suspected that Revan was a reincarnator like him.

One of the reasons that HK was renowned for was the fact that HK's thought matrix hadn't been completely cracked by anyone other than Revan. As Renato looked through the deconstruction of the thought matrix, he couldn't help but be amazed to see that a lot of networking and parallel processing techniques that Renato had recently dissed the Star Wars universe not having were used in HK's thought matrix.

To be honest, if he had to go through HK's thought matrix manually, Renato would have had to clear up his schedule for a minimum of 3 weeks. The networking was very complicated and had many pitfalls for people who are trying to decrypt the thought matrix.

He also found another thing inside HK that had amazed Renato, cursing his stupidity of not thinking of this option. The feature was the ultra-chrome power conduits and armour in HK.

Ultra-chrome was an alloy of phrik and cortosis that was used during the Sith wars. It carried properties of both phrik and cortosis, and only had two downsides of having a slightly lower melting point and being slightly less strong than phrik. It was honestly a metal that had higher strength than any other metal known other than pure phrik, any tech enthusiast would lose his shit over it.

As if lightsaber resistance and massive strength just below phrik weren't enough, the mixing of cortosis and phrik gave birth to a unique phenomenon that made the alloy a room-temperature superconductor. If the previous reasons were not enough just the room-temperature superconductor property alone would cause enough upheaval to cause at least a small-scale war.

(I know on the wiki it says it is a metal, not an alloy, but since there aren't any known sources for ultra-chrome, this is my headcanon)

Unfortunately, the method of manufacturing ultra-chrome has been lost. But Renato was not sad, instead, it made him even more excited to experiment to recreate ultra-chrome, or making an even better alloy. Trying to recreate and reverse engineering alloys and technology they got from salvaged covenant or forerunner items and ships was one of the UNSC's major research spending areas.

The amount of time and money the UNSC spent trying to reverse engineer stuff had caused a lot of techniques and methods for reverse engineering to be developed. These techniques were devised to be used on forerunner made items which were way more advanced than anything most of the Star Wars world used.

This meant that the journey to rediscover the making of ultra-chrome gave him a challenge he hadn't felt for quite a while. Anyway, he had something to kill time in his free time now.

"Hey, Paddy. Can you send me the latest material analysis research papers from the holonet, and try to be as complete as you can?"

"Sure"

Within 2 mins he got a ping on his datapad with a website-like interface with a tree chart with instructions on which order he should look the topics through. It was like a Wikipedia of all the research papers on the material science of the galaxy. Though it probably couldn't be the complete galaxy's research papers because some governments don't connect to the interplanetary holonet or require a specific network key to access their holonet.

Honestly, he was a bit jealous of the current him, if only literature review was this easy during his time in college. But this was incredibly helpful and reduced his work stress by a lot. Paddy was the best thing that had happened to Renato, if this was how Tony Stark felt with Jarvis then no wonder, he was miles ahead of everyone on his earth. Half of the time in research was picking through previous research papers and he could directly skip that step.

Back to his work in understanding HK47, he found that most of HK's droid body wasn't that much more interesting and he was surprised to find that a lot of technology used in his body would be now considered dated.

He always felt that the galaxy's technology regressed from the Sith wars era, but looking through the droid body of HK, he knew things weren't that simple. It was just the military technologies that were either lost or regressed due to the fact that the republic didn't have much military spending and didn't focus any resources on its navies. Civilian technology, on the other hand, has bloomed like anything. Just looking at the servos and power cells, they had come a long, long way since then.

Finally, after combing through the rest of the droid, Renato felt that if he wanted, he could create an exact replica of the droid. Honestly, he felt the most valuable part was the way Revan made the combat knowledge for the droid, it was surprisingly similar to motion capture. He then modified the movements so that they fit the droids more efficiently and from there he let the improvement algorithms take over.

After looking at all the combat improvements and battle techniques that HK made, he couldn't help but admire the learning algorithms of this universe. However, he could still spot some holes in tactics and team fighting.

He felt that he needed to redesign HK completely from the ground up while still keeping the aesthetics because he felt that HK needed to look aggressive. And that is what he did, spending 8 hours redesigning HK's body.

The final outcome was a droid that was 18% more efficient than the previous droid and that was just from the hardware perspective. With the Huragoks software modifications, the newer HK was at least several times more dangerous than before.

The other benefit was that as he worked on HK more and more, he was accessing a large portion of Halo's modern humanity's knowledge in the field of robots and had benefited immensely.

Now that he had completed the droid build, he felt it was time for the huragok magic.

"Paddy, would you be a dear and request for one of the huragoks to come up, please? I want them to manufacture something"

It only took 15 mins for Lostal to show up.

"Hey buddy, I want you to remake this droid with these plans. Will that be enough material?"

Lostal connected to the datapad, and went through the plan and obviously made some changes. At this point, Renato had given up ever completely reaching the level of these huragoks within at least a century of focused learning. It felt more and more impossible to reach the level of technology of forerunners the deeper Renato went into technology.

Within a few seconds, Lostal went through the plans, and then compared the number of materials in the droid.

Lostal responded that it would take a few more materials but replied that we already had the materials on the ship. While C2 was instructed to bring the materials, Renato mentioned something to Lostal.

"Hey when you are remaking the droid, make sure to copy all the systems and databases perfectly to the new droid.

Can you also not turn on the droid after completing the rebuild?"

He reminded Lostal because he wasn't sure if he would copy the data banks or not, anyway better to be safe than sorry, and the reason he didn't want to turn on the droid was obvious. Unless he was absolutely sure that HK would not go on a killing spree, Renato was not willing to take chances.

It only took 10 mins for Lostal to remake the entire droid. The new HK was a sight to see, now a little taller than the original model, he had probably the best combat sensor system for his head, and he had combined a lot of the servo tech from Halo so that HK now had a much higher precision to pick and handle a single needle not that HK would take up sewing as a hobby, just the image of HK sewing a sweater for his meatbag master had him laughing his ass off.

Another thing that was different from the previous HK was the hidden blades and backup inbuilt blasters in the arm and a jetpack for improved manoeuvrability. Following that were the droid brain upgrades and finally, there were a few patches to the system with updated language libraries as the galaxy had greatly advanced language studies since HK's time and now all protocol droids speak, read and write 6 million languages and had greatly improved from the 6000 languages since HK's time.

Another patch was an updated fighting techniques patch, in which he had inputted all the fighting techniques from the earth, lightsaber combat and assassin skills from assassin's creed.

Now that the droid was complete, Renato thanked and dismissed Lostal and C2 and moved to the training room that Paddy asked the huragok to make on the ship. Finally, he locked the door to the room and got into a combat-ready position, and turned on the droid.

It took a few seconds for the system to initialise, and the droid immediately came alive.

"Statement: There looks to be a mistake, my chronosensor is showing that more than 3400 years have passed since my last activation.

Exclamation: This new body is much better than my previous body and the efficiency of my system seems to have drastically increased.

Query: Are you the meatbag that made these changes to me?"

"Yes, I am the one who salvaged you from the ship you crashed in and remade you from the bottom up with the help of another alien and I am your new master."

"Grateful: I am very pleased with my new upgrade master.

Query: Do you have any meat bags that you want me to kill?"

"No, not currently."

"Observation: Not currently implies that there will be meat bags to kill in the future master?"

"Sigh, yes. There will definitely be targets to kill."

"Excited: Wonderful master! Then I shall wait as I plan for the death of the next meatbag."

"You do you, but first let's have a non-lethal sparring match, come at me with all you got and be careful I am a force user"

"Suprise: A meatbag that hopes to match skills with me?

Statement: I will gladly oblige you to show the barrel end of my blaster master."

HK got to the armoury and came out with its selection of weapons, and the match was signalled to start and HK was already on the move and Renato had already started to draw in the force to enhance him as he created distance with HK and firing from his rifle. HK quickly dodged it and fired back.

This kind of volley was going on for quite some time before Renato started closing in on HK and attacked with his dual lightsabers.

However, HK had already predicted it and instead was luring Renato into a trap. Renato quickly noticed this as he saw two sonic bombs placed in strategic locations. He smirked internally as he made a plan to make a counter-ambush.

As soon as the bombs went off, Renato quickly acted as if he was affected, but he was in fact not. One of the things that spartans got was the training in case someone attacks with sensory overload.

Sure, there would be ringing for some time, but he wasn't affected as much as a normal human would have been. Now all he had to do was to wait for HK to drop his guard to attack.

Sure, enough seeing that Renato was affected by the sonic bomb. HK started shooting from his position expecting Renato not to be able to put up a decent resistance due to the disruption of his force skills. However, HK miscalculated due to the fact that it had limited information on its opponent.

Renato was naturally as strong as a Jedi after force enhancement, he quickly capitalised on this chance and ran into HK at full speed while deflecting the blaster bolts and swung his lightsaber to cut down HK who was starting his jet pack to make a quick escape but Renato was simply faster and only stopped when his lightsaber was within an inch.

"Looks like I have won this round HK."

"Confused query: How was it that you were able to use your force skills when you were disrupted by the sonic bombs?"

Renato said with a smirk "I am not like most meatbags. I was an experimental product made by intermixing the DNA of different species. Further on that, I have made severe augmentations to increase the capabilities of my body."

"Assessment: It seems that I have miscalculated due to insufficient information about my enemy.

Hypothesis: You were indeed disrupted by my sonic bombs, but your meatbag body can work at a level of force enhancement naturally. Thus, your body is already strong as a Jedi without using force."

"Yes, your hypothesis is correct"

"Evaluation: Now that I know your capabilities, I have recalculated my battle strategies against you."

"Sure, from now on you are my sparring partner and I will spar with you whenever possible."

"Statement: Wonderful! To be in service to a meatbag is such a pleasure"

With the sarcastic tone, he could hear in the statement, Renato was less inclined to believe it.