Chapter 16: The Hunt and the Long Awaited Rediscovery

Star Wars + Harry Potter Crossover

Chapter 16: The Hunt and the Long Awaited Rediscovery

753 BBY

2,900 ATC

Bespin

Ten years. It taken him ten years to hunt down the wily bastard that was once the Jedi Padawan Sett Harth.

The first thing that he had created, or rather had instructed droid Hermione to create, was a new type of recon drone, it was about the size and shape of a baseball as well as being completely black. He then sent them (with stygium crystals to enable cloaking) and posted them around every hidey hole that he had managed to glean from Hakk's mind.

He still had no idea how his factory had managed to make the cloaking work on something so small. Harry had made the mistake of asking once and had come to three simple conclusions.

His first was that, yet again, no matter how evil or morally bankrupt the Infinite Empire once was they were technologically brilliant. Not only had the request been quickly answered, but it seemed that it was easy for them.

The second thing was that when he had, politely mind you, asked droid Hermione to explain and she had started to rattle off a string of numbers and techno jargon that left him feeling dizzy and had left him with an intense migraine.

He had not asked again.

The third was more of a dawning realisation of a number of little things that he had not paid much attention to until now and they all concerned the state of the Republic.

In the last two thousand years there had been almost no technological advancement (excluding a few ideas that had been rediscovered) in fact, it could be concluded, instead of advancement that there had been a series of regressions in technology as they were either (more often than not) forgotten or (much more rarely) classified by either the Senate or the Jedi as too dangerous to be known to the general public.

It was more than that though. It appeared that the Senate was simply so large and bloated by corruption that the left-hand rarely knew what the right hand was doing and so almost all of this was happening automatically with few, if any, knowing exactly what was going on.

In short the Republic was stagnant, if not in decline, and it was just becoming worse. Harry did not help that stagnation (or regression) along but he did nothing to hinder it either as it suited his purposes nicely.

After all the last thing he needed was a revitalized and cohesive Republic to decide that a closer look at him or Potter Industries would be a good idea. Not that they would at this moment anyway as they were still dealing with both the financial fallout (read crisis) and the labour shortage caused by breaking their agreement with Potter Industries.

Over the last ten years Harry had been frustrated at many turns but he had quickly found out how Sett Harth was extending his life. He was using a Sith version of Harry's technique and, although he used clones rather than blood bags as well, that meant while the technique had some flaws it was none the less quite effective.

It was probably some Sith that stumbled over remnants of the Infinite Empires techniques, mused Harry, who then went on to develop this version. Then again they themselves had also regressed thanks to the madness of Darth Gravid.

He almost shuddered to think where the Sith would be now, given the Republics slow decline, if that were not the case.

On the plus side the elusive nature of his quarry, along with being free of the Jedi's watchful gaze, had enabled him to do a few things that he had either not been able to do or simply not felt comfortable doing while under their watch.

First and foremost, given his visions, he had reactivated the military arm of his droid manufacturing process. The bowels of Spero now teemed with droids and the standard HP-15's now numbered almost eight million with almost two hundred thousand Jedi Killers on top of that.

He had also built, or caused to have built, a number of other things that would make invading his adopted system unwise to say the least. One of the things that he did was to alter his droids so that they were all armoured in New Atlantis Steel (or NAS for short).

One of the other things he had arranged was a nice surprise on the gas giant Cadi for any that might try and pass it along the way to his adopted homeworld.

He had as a final measure managed to improve his already considerable reputation in the Outer Rim as he had, sometimes financially or with medical aid (though only rarely with careful application of the Force), helped no less than eighteen troubled worlds that the Republic (with its almost laser focus on the Core and troubled financial situation) had left to flounder.

Add that to his not inconsiderable reputation from when he was a Jedi as well as being the head of Potter Industries (his 'brother' having died of 'natural causes' five years before) and he was still a figure that commanded respect and increasingly maybe even a little bit of awe.

That was not the most surprising development that had come about in the last ten years however as that title belonged to the state of his magic.

Being free of both the Jedi's watchful gaze and their almost constant demands on his time had enabled him to fully master the somewhat limited spells that he knew as he could now not only cast them all silently but with no wand movements or, in the case of his ring, barely a twitch of his finger.

There was disturbing news in that area as well unfortunately. Due to the many constraints on his time, as well as his left over Occlumency from the Horcrux Harry had once carried, he had felt no need to access the centre of his mind with any urgency. Ironically enough, if one was learning the Mind Arts the natural way, that was exactly where you started but Harry had felt no need as he already had shields.

That turned out to be a mistake on his part.

Magic, in general, was quite loose with natural laws. His scar housed a soul piece for example and had not crumbled (so he believed) simply due to the physical distance between Voldemort and himself... not alone at least. It wasn't actually the distance that was a problem but rather the increased magical drain that such a distance caused.

In essence the soul piece could not drain enough magic at once to both sustain its existence and maintain the tie to the main piece as well as fight off his natural magics attempt to destroy it. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that it didn't even have the Earth's natural magic, a trickle though it was, helping it along. That was of course without including the, quite likely, increased power requirement to keep a link through a displacement in time.

When he had finally gotten around to accessing the centre of his mind he first marveled at the motes of light that were dancing in the mental sky. He found himself standing in what appeared to be an endless stretch of grass and that the motes that danced in the sky were the Force playing endlessly in their own internal rhythm and entwined with his very being.

It certainly wasn't his magic as he saw that just to the left of him and the sight of it left him enraged.

His magic was a multi-coloured pulsing tree that almost buffeted the air with waves of power and, ordinarily, that would have made Harry smile except for one large problem.

There was a sickly dark grey band wrapped around the tree and, though his magic was still strong, it was bending and almost being broken by it. The band wrapped around the entirety of the tree, from trunk to branch, but it was hardly the only one (just the largest).

There were almost thirty other bands, these were a dark purple in colour instead of grey, that were smaller and seemed to be supporting the larger grey one.

Harry felt like he had been raped by the intrusion.

This was the deepest part of his mind. It was also the one place that no one was supposed to be able to enter and the one place that was wholly and utterly his. It was the one sacrosanct piece of him that no one should ever be able to alter or control.

It was the very depths of his soul.

It was so deep in fact there were no memories here, no thoughts, no musings, no constructs. It went further than that, deeper than that, it was the gestalt and bedrock of his very being. Memories were much closer to the surface as they could change or fade with time and they were deeply flavoured by his mood at the moment that they were created. If they were the surface this was the exact opposite. This was his inner most core.

And someone had violated it.

Given the fact that this… binding was here he could only think of two people who may have done it (three if you counted Voldemort). He immediately discounted Voldemort as it simply was not his style given that Voldemort didn't want to control Harry or weaken him but annihilate him. Voldemort wished to remove any trace of Harry from existence...to make it as if he never was. This much Harry was able to glean from not only his experiences with the lunatic but also from the very moment the scar had imploded.

It also was not the work of a student as it was too artfully done, too structured and precise, for any student to even attempt and that left Harry considering the only other two mind readers that he was aware of that could use magic.

Snape and Dumbledore had done this to him, thought Harry, the utter and complete bastards.

They may have had a good reason for doing this but Harry could not think of one. Many dark and horrible thoughts began to filter through his brain and even though he wondered why they had done this he realised that it did not matter.

There would be no excuse, no forgiveness, for this travesty.

Thankfully his magic had been strong enough to survive whatever binding that Dumbledore had placed on it (or the binding itself had been designed to keep it functioning to a degree) and had even begun to break it.

Or it had tried at least as he could see little cracks throughout the larger one and that was where (Harry assumed) the 'Beloved Potions Master' had come in as the smaller purple ones were attached to, and supporting, the weakened areas. They even seemed to be feeding it and, worse, were somehow leeching his own magic to do so putting his magic into a perpetual cycle of self destruction.

He thought that it must have happened during his laughingly abysmal 'Occlumency lessons' that he had been forced to have with Snape, the vile man had somehow shored up the damage to the main binding.

He was sure that Dumbledore had some reason for doing this thing, after all the man always had a reason, he was certain that it wouldn't be a good one or at least not good enough to justify this invasion.

Unless it was meant to be good enough that Harry would hear it and then slip a lightsaber between the man's ribs. Then, and only then, could it be considered good enough he thought.

Harry then had a moment of daydreaming about all the ways that he would make Dumbledore suffer for such a violation and was honestly torn between cutting him slowly to pieces with his lightsaber or electrifying the white haired eye twinkling son of a bitch until his very muscles cracked his bones from spasms and his veins glowed red with heat and cooked him from the inside.

Though the Force and magic, in his experience, either ignored one another or reacted badly to each other (in rare cases), he was in the very depths of his own mind and as such the guidelines for these things were more fluid here than they might otherwise be and much much more susceptible to his will.

Harry Potter could be said to possess many things but one of his defining traits, possibly chief among them, was his prodigious will. After all he was one of the youngest, if not the youngest, wizard to cast a Patronus and that was despite the bindings.

That being said he was seemingly unable to call on his magic to break his bindings and he couldn't help but think that they were designed that way. If he were a normal wizard then this would have condemned him to live without the full scope of his abilities. He was not however a normal wizard and had not been for some time.

So, after trying to call on his magic to defeat the bindings and failing, he managed to call on the Force.

The struggle was immense, even here, and he somehow knew that the binding had been on his magic for a very long time. At first he failed at outright removing the large grey and sickly looking thing as they were too well entwined with both his magic and the smaller purple ties.

At length (and thinking himself extremely foolish) he realised that he needed to try a different tactic. He began to will the Force into a scythe of almost incandescent power.

Slowly the glowing motes began responding to his will and, after coalescing and fully taking that shape, he savagely and even brutally first attacked the smaller 'ropes' that helped anchor and support the large one.

That they were cut so easily, as well as being a uniformly toxic purple colour, reinforced the idea that it was Snape not Dumbledore that had placed them as, even on his best day, Snape was not the most powerful wizard. Inventively cruel and sadistic maybe, certainly petty, but not the most powerful.

They soon faded away like so much smoke on a bright sunny afternoon.

He then turned back to the large grey rope. It's cracks where much more evident and he could even see especially large ones at its base as his magic had obviously been fighting against it for a very long time (possibly from the moment that it was first placed on it).

Looking at the thing now, free of all other impediments, he was even more disgusted by it. It appeared almost like a large grey pulsing slug and as much as anything could it pulsated with wrongness to his eyes.

Now that he had an opening that he could exploit he pushed the Force into the largest cracks and, instead of trying to attack head on, began to make them widen by reforming the scythe into two large bars and pushing them apart.

The difficulty of even this manoeuvre was almost beyond description, though compared to his first attempt, it was slightly easier. Harry had the fleeting and distant impression that, in the waking world, his body was shaking and drenched in sweat.

It did make him certain however that it was Dumbledore that had done this to him. After all, despite the obvious moral deficiencies of the man, it took a great deal of power to do this and apart from anything else he was known to have that in spades giving the man's historical accomplishments.

In the midst of this titanic struggle Harry vowed to never again trust the old man as this was much more than a step too far... this is more like a planet's worth of steps at least.

Harry was uncertain for how long he struggled as his entire focus was fixated on removing this taint from himself. It could have been hours later, days, minutes or seconds even Harry was unsure and time was a relative thing especially in his own mind.

Eventually, slowly but surely, the binding began to fail first with the already present cracks widening and then with great tears forming in it. Like dominoes falling the speed began to increase as more and more of it ceased to function until in a great rush the horrid thing turned to smoke like it's smaller cousins.

When he had awoken he had noticed straight away that things felt different.

Before his magic had, outside of life threatening danger during which he assumed the binding loosened out of self preservation, like an eager puppy running around near his heart. It was present and ready to act but now it was so much more than that. He felt that for the first time he truly understood, on a purely visceral level, that muggles and wizards were inherently different.

He was a magical being, first and foremost, and the magic of the Potter bloodline sang joyously in his blood. It was in his heart, mind, body, and soul and it infused his every cell. For a moment, he fancied that he could even see it settling down from it's almost furious rainbow hue into a deep soothing emerald green.

His magic was as much a part of him as his arm or foot, more so even given his unique situation as well as the fact that he had lost limbs before but never his magic, and he revelled in feeling truly whole for the first time in his life especially as he wasn't aware of what it felt like to be so in tune with himself before.

The surprises were not to end there however as he found, upon waking in the real world, that magic came to him much easier now and he found that it even felt cleaner than it had before. It was almost akin to having always had to drink dirty infected water only to be given his very first taste of pure spring water.

More than that it was this, he would later reflect, that would allow him to master the (albeit limited) repertoire of spells.

He also found that as the amount of power increased that he was able to put in his spells so too did their telltale colour decrease. Eventually, over the years, he found that it decreased so much that where once you could guess what Harry was casting they had become almost colourless beams of power with only the barest tint of their original colour.

More than any of that however, for the first time since he had discovered the bindings, his soul felt clear and truly his own.

All of this led him to being confident in confronting a Dark Jedi, like Sett Harth, that had lived for hundreds of years.

As Harry stood outside of Sett Harth's current bolt hole, he mentally checked himself.

He had trained.

He had prepared and studied.

He was ready.

On a palatial estate on Bespin Sett Harth would meet his final end.

This he vowed.

Sett Harth knew that he was being hunted but He did not know by whom.

Being proud of himself on being able to move on a whim and, despite the dark aura that he gave off to those sensitive to such things, he was the consummate con man always able to charm who wanted to and truly enjoy his immortal existence.

Not the last eight years though. He honestly thought that it could have been longer than that but it started out so innocently that he, at first, thought that it was just really bad luck.

He should have known better.

Three of his forty eight immaculately decorated homes had been destroyed in the span of two years and then almost all of his sixteen aliases had been tagged for crimes that he didn't even do. That was just the start as even more had followed until he was left with few choices and no ideas.

To the always immaculately dressed man who never had a hair out of place it was galling as he could not even live the life that he wished as he wished and, he often thought to himself, if that was not the point of immortality then had no idea what was.

Since then it has only gotten worse as (in the best of times) he had once had ten clones in 'storage' waiting for him once his current body began to show the disgusting signs of age at thirty and in the intervening years nine of them had been destroyed. He once had thought that ten clones would have been more than enough to ensure his continued existence and he now understood how wrong he was as nine of them had been lost.

Then was the knowledge that if this unnamed adversary knew enough to destroy them then it would be unsafe to contact any cloning facilities to make more. Given that he was being very effectively hunted he honestly had no idea how much his adversary knew.

Unbeknownst to him Harry had managed to 'sneak' a droid into the cold storage facility where his preferred cloners kept his DNA and infected it with a very specific retrovirus.

This act would have normally been outside of Harry skillset but, as with the recon droids, he had merely asked for it to be done. What he had done differently was that, once it was done, he had asked for all records of the retrovirus and its creation to be destroyed as such knowledge would be beyond dangerous in the wrong hands.

Before that had happened however the unnamed droid had managed to taint not only the sample of DNA but also each of the ten clones with the retrovirus.

Sett Harth did not know this nor did he know that the final clone, as one of the ten, would most likely be the last clone that he would ever inhabit.

Instead he was busy trying to figure out who had done this thing to him. Most of his enemies did not even know his real name and, thanks in part to Darth Gravid as well as his vigilant nature, the Sith were not even aware that he existed.

Could it be a Jedi? He wondered, while sitting in the lounge his first (and now last) him (in his opinion) this place was tasteful and elegant but, he reflected, a gilded cage is still a cage.

No, he decided at length, no Jedi would be so underhanded. The few that believed that he was anything more than a ghost story over the years had charged in recklessly and been easily as well as ruthlessly dispatched.

Added to that they were still dealing with the fallout of being responsible for the largest crisis that the fetid Republic had faced in centuries. What then, he wondered, could it be? What or who was coming for him?

He had a nagging thought then, something that itched at the back of his brain, but he couldn't quite realise it except to know that it had something to do with his latest Jedi pawn.

He fondly remembered twisting the young Hakk as there was such potential in the boy. He didn't like him, someone like himself would never like a pawn or anyone for that matter, but he did savour the satisfaction of twisting a self righteous Jedi to the Dark side.

Sadly it was the very reason that had so twisted the boy that had made him a pawn rather than a player in the great game that was life.

Love.

Sett snorted at that as nothing was more ridiculous to the man who lived for himself (and only himself) than romantic love.

Sett Harth was many things but he would never understand putting someone, anyone, before himself and therefore the idea that someone would and may even die for them was not just ridiculous but obscene to him. He was more than happy to slowly twist it into something else however. It was almost like making a beautiful piece of art, he reflected, each twist was unique to his target and in the end they became something useful to him.

Sett Harth only cared about Sett Harth after all.

Before he could ponder the conundrum of who was targeting him further the front door of his lounge blew inward, from a series of explosions, with such force is it also nearly blew his arm almost completely off as he raised it to protect his face. In fact, by the look of it, it was only being held on by a few damaged muscles and torn skin. It was already beginning to spurt blood out of his body at an alarming rate.

He set off running, ignoring his pain, even as he heard mechanical feet stomping behind him and barked orders following them and for the first time in many years he felt true fear.

Harry was not aware of this hectic running by his quarry being instead too focused on giving orders to his Jedi Killers.

He was just thankful that Sett Harth had underestimated his old friend.

It appeared to Harry that Hakk was viewed as a tool and nothing more. While it was insulting to the memory of his friend it did allow Hakk to learn more than Harth had anticipated and that included this secret palatial home.

Harth had very few defences to this place when compared to his other houses as he had effectively abandoned it after Darth Bane's successor Darth Zannah had not only found him here but successfully recruited him, at that time, to the Sith.

Thankfully for Harth that recruitment had not only ended with him having his life intact and free of Sith entanglements but had, in the course of his unwilling servitude, led him to the secrets of eternal life. It was a secret that Harry imagined the Dark Jedi was very thankful not to share with Darth Zannah.

Sett had of course kept payments up on the land just in case it was ever needed but, as the years went by, he had never added security as its defence was that no one knew that it had ever belonged to him.

Until Hakk.

Honestly, Harry thought, that man was a born Ravenclaw if ever there was one. I know that I never could have found this place buried underneath so much other information (not alone at least).

Banishing away the immediate wave of sadness as he thought about this lost friend Harry, with the ease of long days on gory battlefields, tried to return to the task at hand.

His hand reached down and grasped the pale green lightsaber which was one of the spares that he'd picked up along the way. He still hadn't gotten around to remaking his own just yet as it simply didn't feel right.

His ten Jedi Killers moved forward at his gesture and, despite trying to keep his mind only on the task at hand, he couldn't help but marvel at the differences that New Atlantis Steel had done to them as opposed to the relatively simplistic phrik.

Objectively the burnished steel looked almost like liquid silver over their faces and on looks alone Harry thought it was an improvement. Of course the manufacturing process went deeper than that and it was not merely an aesthetic change that they had gone through.

Because NAS was magically charged he was able to get away with a few shortcuts that would have even taken days to complete (not to mention left him magically exhausted) for the ten or simply been unable to do it at all.

Their swords, as just one example, were given simple eversharp and reparo runes so that it took a lot more effort to dent them or damage them as (like all the runes he had ever come across) you would first have to overwhelm the inherit magic that was naturally in the blades.

In a similar fashion, though obviously less powerfully given the surface area involved, there was a series of reparo runes etched into the armour body of the droids themselves. Though not powerful enough that a truly severed limb would instantly begin to reattach itself damage would slowly heal and the droid would be functional (to a point) for a far longer time.

Harry had not added more than this as the steel would not regenerate magic away from a planet with high magical saturation like the Spero system and even then, as it was not a natural biological process, it would be only the bearest of trickles.

It was frustrating to him because he knew that, in theory, there were advanced runes that could have absorbed various forms of energy and use them to recharge magic. However, outside of the most basic ones that were given as examples of outdated archaic and massive runes in his book, he simply did not know them.

The archaic ones that he did know were simply too large and when placed on his creations they lost all effectiveness when made to fit or shrunk to size (he had tried).

Still, both he and his droids, moved forward slowly and precisely further into palatial and very gaudy house. If Harry didn't know that it was not possible he would have thought that Minister Fudge himself had a hand in the decoration as it was so over the top.

They were moving carefully to avoid any possible traps that the man had set but they were not worried about him escaping as they had that covered. Recon droids were hidden around any possible exit and Harry may have also incorporated high powered explosive cores in these particular droids design.

Harry almost hoped that Sett Harth tried to run and met one of them but that was beside the point.

Suddenly, as they moved to explore the dwelling, a fresh faced and whole Sett Harth set upon the leading droid with an almost calculated abandon. Harry despite himself could not help but raise an eyebrow in surprise at the man's obvious skill with a blade.

No matter if in recent years he had let himself go, gotten soft as it were, Harth did have years (if not generations) to improve his skills. In this aspect of his life, if nothing else, he has achieved a level of skill that Yoda clearly yearned for and Harry could not help but look upon him with more than a little envy.

Sett first threw three of the Jedi Killers with the Force smashing them violently against the wall while impaling another through the chest with his red saber. It was a good blow being aimed right were the power circuits on most models would be.

Sett was more than a little surprised then when the impaled droid, instead of falling into a powerless heap, used one hand to grab and almost crush his saber wielding arm while making a precise swing already trying to decapitate him with its own sword in its hand.

Using skillful acrobatics he brought his feet up to the chest plate of his enemy while dodging the swing and, using both the droid and the Force as a springboard, somersaulted back and out of danger for the moment.

The other six began to move in as Harry stood back and watched his creations work intently and silently, he began to both judge their worth and mentally begin to fix any flaws that he could see.

Sett Harth had lived long enough and he was able to adapt quickly and expertly rolled backwards giving himself even more space from the impaled droid and it's battered fellows.

Sett's eyes widened however as he stood because he noticed that the three that he had thrown earlier had started to, quite impossibly, stand rather than becoming the scrap that he expected them to be. He also noticed the glowing shapes on their armour and couldn't help but wonder if they had something to do with it.

Worse for him Sett noticed the other seven droids approaching. He also finally realised that he was in the presence of the most famous former Jedi in recent years who was looking at him like a cat watched a mouse just before it pounced.

It was almost like it was some sort of test, Harth thought with a dawning sense of foreboding, but if it was it wasn't for him but the droids instead.

About to be overrun Sett Harth did the only thing that he thought he could do.

Opening himself up fully to the Dark side of the Force he unleashed a barrage of Force Lightning on all of the inhabitants of the room whilst smirking knowing that the raw destructive power of the attack should end this combat quickly.

He was right to a point.

The power that was released was no mere spark or even several strips that Harry had come to associate with that dark gift. instead it was a violent, all consuming and almost unstoppable storm.

Sett Harth watched with mounting frustration as, before his awesome power, the droids seemed to somehow be resisting. So with a snarl of rage poured everything that he had into it and electrified each and every one of them into so much hot and glowing scrap.

He then turned, expecting to see a charred human corpse but, what he saw had him literally gaping in shock.

He saw a sweaty, obviously strained, human face staring at him from behind a strange and faintly blue energy shield.

He certainly also didn't expect that the face would be smirking at him in return.

"You didn't need to do that. The Jedi Killers would have failed in moments anyway". Harry then grimaced, as if he had swallowed something distasteful, and conceded a point "You really were very powerful you know?".

"What do you mean? I am powerful and I am much more powerful than any one pathetic Jedi" Sett sneered.

It was painfully obvious to Harry that Sett's bravado was not only somewhat forced but his attempt at gaining more information. Harry, on the other hand, also found it very hard to care one way or the other.

"Oh I agree" said Harry chuckling to himself and under other circumstances Sett would have found it odd as here they were, about to fight to the death, and his enemy was chuckling.

However, after being hunted and having his beautiful home destroyed, it was fair to say that Sett Harth was beyond that level of thought at the moment. His rage had only increased as he belatedly realised the damage that his own lightning had done to his beautiful things. Even now some of his most precious and expensive things were either burning or were outright unsalvageable.

"They are pathetic aren't they? At least that stupid Progressive movement is… though I suppose that's all of them now". Harry raised eyebrow before continuing "But you prove yourself just as stupid by missing my point. You are already dead and you have been since you unleashed your attack upon my droids". He nodded to Sett Harth his face now easy to read without the shield partially obscuring the view.

Sett Harth followed Harry's eyes to his body and what he saw made him choke in dawning horror.

For the first time in his long life he found that his skin was quickly showing the ravages of time. It was already aged to such a degree already that his hands had several liver spots and there was a mass of wrinkles where they used to just be perfectly healthy and youthful skin.

Age had quite literally caught up with him and, quite understandably given the fact that he truly enjoyed the pleasures of youth, it had turned into a phobia for him and as such he was not just horrified, but almost petrified with fear as he saw his body rapidly ageing in front of his eyes.

Eyes which had already began to cloud over with cataracts.

"What?" Sett managed to gasp. He felt his knees turn to water and his limbs buckle beneath him as the onset of his advanced years robbed of the ability to walk.

"Did you really think" said Harry while trying not to take satisfaction in the way that he had heard those knees crack and break as they hit the floor and unsuccessfully tried to redistribute their weight. "That I left your last clone alone because I missed it?".

"How?" Sett's voice, once so youthful, was dry and cracked seemingly exhausted by that one simple word.

"I corrupted your biological sample. Essentially the body has a natural insulation against the effects of heavy Force use and the channeling of such power is taxing, not to mention the corrupting nature of the Dark side, it has to really or Jedi and Sith would be dropping like flies. I simply removed that protection from your system".

Harry was not Voldemort and was not ordinarily given to gloating over a successfully executed plan and this was not what he was doing (not quite anyway). In fact harry found that form of grandstanding, outside of trying to off balance a foe while fighting, to be the height of stupidity.

Instead it was Harry's desire that Sett Harth understand why this was happening to him and that, if he had left Hakk alone none of this would have been possible. Harry cared little for the Republic and less for the Jedi as a whole as they had all made their choices and so, if Sett had left Hakk alone, it was quite possible that he would still be enjoying his immortal existence.

"How does it feel to know that your own power is killing you?" Harry asked genuinely curious "As to how I found you... you should really keep better track of what your pawns are doing".

By this point Sett Harth's body was beyond wizened with age as he looked like a man in his early third century of life, with arthritis having now turned his hands to claws and having only a few wispy hairs on his head with his back bent with the strain of his years, he did not have long left.

"Okay" Harry continued when he realised that Sett was not going to answer his question. "I might have done a bit more then I said to help the process along but then you really shouldn't have targeted my friend".

"W-who?" Sett managed to grasp out from a prone and crumpled position on the floor. It may have been one word but Harry understood what he meant. He wanted to know who had betrayed him and who, at least in his mind, had caused all of this.

"Why my friend of course. I have no idea if you gave him a ridiculous 'new' name but I always knew him as Hakk...Hakk Fry. You are responsible for his death and I suppose in a way he has managed to be responsible for yours too".

"P-please" pleaded Sett, his was voice barely a whisper now and he just about managed to raise one hand in a desperate attempt to seek mercy. It felt to Sett that there was a whole world suddenly covering his body as the corruption from the Dark side did it's work. Everything in his body was rapidly shutting down, even his lungs felt heavy, and it seemed that even keeping his eyes open was a struggle.

"How many people have you killed simply for your own amusement?" Harry spat out unmoved by Sett's plea and with a deep and toxic venom lacing his voice. "How many of them had families? How many loved ones cried?" Harry's eyes were cold even as they narrowed to slits "How many begged?".

Harry did truly considered going over to him and cutting off his head though it was not out of a sense of mercy or kindness that he did so. Harry was more than a little upset that a man such as the one laying before him would dare to seek any sort of mercy after what they had done. Harry shook his head slowly as to cut Sett's head off now would only further sully Harry, and that victory, no matter how small, his enemy would not have.

"No. You showed your victims no mercy and so you shall have none from me. To give you any would be a disservice and final insult to them".

Instead Harry tapped a quick code into his bracer signalling more droids to converge on his position and then he dragged an upturned chair over and, for the next minute or two at least, watched Sett Harth slowly die.

He took no pleasure in it, in fact he felt more than a little empty over the whole thing, instead it was more about making sure that he was actually dead and did not have one final escape plan.

How much blood would be on his hands before he was done? Harry wondered caught up in the knowledge that, yet again he had taken a life. Granted this was justified and, if life were a game, then Sett Harth had to be removed from the board. He was simply too much of a danger to ever remain in play.

Still no matter how cynical life got Harry was reminded of two lessons. The first was that the universe ran on the idea of force. Money was force as bribes could force many things to happen, blackmail and extortion were forceful applications of knowledge as well. At their heart none of the methods that anyone used was pure so what made physical force so objectionable?.

Harry shrugged while thinking at least a lightsaber was honest about it. It had no double speak, no complexities. It was as simple as the thrust of a blade.

But good or bad there would always be blood on his hands even discounting his time of manipulation under the Sith. In this universe there were no heroes and, by and large, no villains just people looking out for themselves and their own.

Someday he might be okay with that.

The second lesson that he had learned was that, when he was at his most cynical or introspective, he had begun to view life as a great game. Like chess there were pawns and kings as well as all manner of pieces in between.

He smiled briefly remembering an actual chess game, played with giant pieces so very long ago, and he knew that once he never would have entertained such thoughts. He had been so sure of right and wrong then, of good and evil, but now after all of this time what was right and wrong to a universe that didn't care? He just didn't know.

He shook his head. He was no great planner and, unlike Dumbledore with his precious Order, was no chessmaster and frankly he didn't want to be. That was the greatest lesson, hammered home again and again. Though viewing life as a game of chess was an interesting intellectual exercise, if you did it all all the time you missed the point.

Life was not a game of chess and people were not pawns, Harry reminded himself, and anyone who viewed the universe that way deserved to lose.

In these quiet moments he did wonder though exactly how would he be remembered when his day finally came? Would he be the saint or the sinner? Hero or villain? Businessman or butcher?.

He, much like life itself, had no clear answers. He could only, as ever, do the best he could and hope that he helped more than he hurt.

At length and after Harry had both finished thinking and checking Sett Harth's corpse three times (it was well and truly cold by this point) he stood and turned to the set of three waiting Potter Industries protocol droids.

"Strip this place" he commanded "all data, tomes, holocrons and even paperwork if there is any it is to be set aside for me to study later".

The reason he did this, misgivings about his place in the universe aside, was not just because the materials could be dangerous and needed to be disposed of, but also because they were a font of knowledge.

It wasn't just Force based learning that he could discover, if anything in Harry's opinion that would be the least interesting thing that he could learn, it was more the years (possibly centuries) of contacts, information and blackmail material that he might find. After all, by right of conquest if nothing else, it was all now his and he felt that he would need it before the end.

For the first time he activated his 'borrowed' lightsaber and used it for the slightly grizzly task of decapitating Sett Harth. He then slowly turned to one of his droids that was passing by him.

"Pack that up" he gestured to the head "have it passed to one of our friendly Senators along with this message…"

A few days later in a session of the Senate the representative for Alderaan, one Tulac Greel, was arguing yet again for the release of the former Jedi turned criminal Durvan.

This was not surprising to anyone as the Alderaanian had not only been a staunch supporter of the Jedi Order for so long that he (as well as his predecessors) was often referred to, behind his back of course, as the Jedi's voice.

This was not the first time that he had brought the matter up and had tried on every occasion to get 'poor Master Durvan' released. Every single time that they had tried they had failed and they went away, found what they thought was a fresh argument, and tried again.

They completely missed the point of course.

The Senate needed someone easy to blame and the two choices were either William Potter or Jedi Master Durvan. It was an easy choice as Durvan was not only not popular and extremely arrogant but was well within their reach.

No Senator would ever let him go lest the blame have a chance of shifting and moving to them.

All in all it was a relatively boring day. It was so boring in fact that many of the Senate were falling asleep in their pods as the oblivious man droned on and on.

That was until the member for the Brentaal system signaled to be recognised and, at the same time he was doing this, a prerecorded message detailing what he was about to say as well as a rehearsal of the speech and all it contained was being broadcast over the Holonet.

Sometimes bribery and corruption really were useful things.

"Honoured members, Supreme Chancellor, I bring news of grave import. A few days ago Sett Harth, whom the the Jedi in all of their wisdom thought was dead centuries ago, was not only found to be alive but delving into perverse pleasures and the very Dark side itself!"

Pandemonium ensued for quite some time with the Chancellor ineffectively calling for order amist cries like lies and we want proof amongst others. It was a testament to how far the standing of the Order had fallen as well as there were even some cries to disband the Jedi or place them fully under the Senate's control or even to exile them out of the Republic itself.

Eventually calm was restored to the floor, though it had less to do with any power that the Chancellor had and more to do with sore throats, only for the Alderaanian representative to begin his impassioned reply.

"Assuming, which I very much doubt, that this sighting was true why have you not contacted the Jedi concerning this… Dark Jedi are their purview after all?" The overly condescending tone and the implication that his brother in the Senate might be a liar did not earn the man any friends if the stormy looks of some of the other Senators was anything to go by.

"Given the current track record of the Order I would say it was more than sensible not to" came the equally condescending reply. "Apart from that I did not want to be laughed out of any meeting for talking about a supposed dead man". The Senator from Brentaal's voice turned sharp "I would also be very careful about calling me a liar without proof".

In that last sentence the man's voice had turned cold losing all condescension from his tone and suddenly all pretense of disinterest from the other Senator's was forgotten.

One did not reach the height of power in the Republic without being able to sense the proverbial blood in the water and besides, for most of these Senators, they hadn't had this much fun in ages.

The most honourable representative from Alderaan grew red in the face but could not argue against anything that his colleague had said as the track record of the Order was common knowledge and he had insinuated, if not outright stated, that it could be a lie.

The Holonet recording obviously did not contain the back and forth between the two men but that hardly mattered as the main body of what Harry's Senator was saying was planned out well in advance and any delay caused by this back and forth actually helped his message. It gave the common people who were watching the recording more time to digest the words and less time for anyone in power to stop it.

The Chancellor then decided to make his presence known and seemingly came to the aid of the red faced man.

"I am afraid that in a case as sensitive as this the Senate would require absolute proof" The wizened old woman reminded them both in calm soothing tones. "The Senate does not lend credence to unsubstantiated accusations" she reminded them both.

At this the Alderaanian representative smiled certain now that the argument was going to fall apart and they could return to his much more important business. If he heard the Chancellor's rebuke, he either did not care or assumed that it was only meant for his fellow Senator.

"But of course" was the reply from the now smirking Senator of Brentaal. His tone mixed just the right amount of incredulity and indignation at being asked such a thing as if, without all of the unplanned interruptions, he would have already done such a simple thing. He then pitched his voice to carry "I present, verified by twelve independent doctors from a number of systems no less, the head of Sett Harth!".

Screams and shouts once again rang out in the hallowed halls of the Republic's Senate as he both raised and opened the side of the box. Senators were not used to seeing such a grizzly spectacle in front of them as they instead tended to hire assassins when needed...like civilized people.

"How?" gasped the Chancellor, her face now pallid, looking at the gruesome sight.

"A few days ago former Knight Potter who is a former citizen of this glorious Republic found and dealt with this...pest". To the shock of many, instead of continuing his speech he brought out a playback device that slid neatly into his podiums console (it was after all designed only for that purpose). "To save showing what I have no doubt was a glorious and bloody battle we have a partial recording to show you of the event" he then added with a note of threat "I swear on my honour as a Senator that it is a true one".

The small view screens that were inbuilt into each Senators podium, usually used for sending or receiving private messages, were more than up to the task of displaying a short recording. The many Senators were unaware that, at the same time, the same recording was being played across the Holonet.

"W-who?" said the recorded image of a wizened and defeated Sett Harth. The short piece of video played out until Harry left to go get a chair at which point silence descended amongst them all as they digested what they had witnessed.

Predictably the first comment that broke the silence was a stupid one.

"This is fantastic. We can use the murder of a Republic citizen to force Potter Industries to return our money and begin shipping droids again". Those words, jubilant and assured, came out of the Alderaanians mouth in a rush.

He seemed unaware that with that statement those few who doubted, mostly his own supporters, now accepted the video as a complete and accurate retelling of events.

Again the noise level went up and once again the Chancellor tried to calm them down as some agreed and demanded exactly that while others demanded that Potter be rewarded.

The look on the Senator from Brentaal's face though was priceless. He had just assured his systems place in history in delivering the head of Sett Harth and the noise was like a fine wine. He closed his eyes in rapture already imagining the rewards he might receive for exemplary service to his system.

Not to mention the bonus he could receive from his benefactor for performing so well.

Eventually however all good things must come to an end as, this time, the Chancellor was able to restore a semblance of order much like a nanny does to a large group of errant children.

"There is no money that is yours" said the arctic voice of Brentaal's Senator as his brain had come swiftly out of the daydream that he was in and he managed to catch himself up. "Furthermore how would you charge him? He is not a member of or even in the Republic after all and, more to the point, what would you charge him with? Sett Harth has been recorded as dead for centuries and last I checked it was not illegal to kill a corpse...even if one could".

That fact did stump a few of the negative Senators as well as the ones wanting to reward William Potter. As he was not a member of the Republic the most that they could do was try him in absentia and they could give him no reward at all.

Trying to do either would serve little purpose other than making them all look extremely foolish.

"We could seize Potter's Triumph and liquidate it" persisted the Voice of the Jedi.

"And how many other companies and businesses, once you have arbitrarily seized one for no legal reason, would flee to the Outer Rim or beyond? How would that help our economy?" was his opponents dismissive reply.

"The chair recognizes the Senator from Onderon" said the Chancellor swiftly and not only signalled but allowed the man's pod to move into position in record time before another argument could break out between the two men.

If she had hoped that the Senator for Onderon would have something less controversial to say she would soon be disappointed.

"Onderon moves that the Jedi be sanctioned for routinely dismissing and ignoring the threat posed by Sett Harth, if they did not indeed create it as he was once a padawan of their Order, and further that it be public for all to see that the Senate is both just and swift in its actions".

Unlike the Jedi was the unspoken thought of many Senators.

This time the wave of noise was overwhelmingly positive even as the Senator of Alderaan pinched his nose and felt a monumental headache coming on. It had started off as such a good day as well, he couldn't help but think, where did it all go so horribly wrong?

Eventually the man turned to his sometime adversary, sometime friend (after all that was the nature of politics) as their podiums were still exceptionally close together and leaned over to whisper to him.

"Why Twelve doctors?" After all, he thought, twelve was a bit much as he had the head of the man on his person.

"Twelve is a nice number wouldn't you say?" came the smug reply.

Out in the streets of the capital and, soon enough, all over the Republic the message had a strong effect.

Certain dark legends that had persisted and were retold to frighten children, despite the Jedi's strong denials, were now proven to be true and the average citizen had to wonder what else the Jedi might have missed.

There was very little actual fear though as, at least in the eyes of the average citizen, they now had a hero that did not take the Jedi at their word and had even ventured into the realm of dark nightmares to save them.

William Potter and, by extension the entire Potter family, had just become living legends.

Far away from the Senate a console beeped. The sound was shrill and designed to draw the attention of anyone or anything that heard it. This particular part of the console had never lit up before though even though it had been the first function embedded into it and Harry had often hoped that it would.

Within minutes the droid known as Hermione was boarding the latest (and fastest) shuttle that Spero had ever created as she had news for her Master that she knew he would want to hear face to face.

Earth had been found.