The advent of large-scale quantum computing threatens the public-key cryptography that secures internet communications today: Shor’s algorithm breaks the integer-factorization and discrete-logarithm problems underlying RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography. In response, NIST has standardized Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) algorithms resistant to quantum crypt- analysis. After selecting the lattice-based ML-KEM (FIPS 203) as its primary Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), NIST announced HQC (Hamming Quasi-Cyclic) in March 2025 as a structurally independent second standard, based on the Quasi-Cyclic Syndrome Decoding problem rather than lattice assumptions. This algorithmic diversity improves the crypto-agility of the PQC ecosystem, but it comes at a cost: HQC’s polynomial multiplication, which accounts for approximately 95% of the cycles spent in key generation, encapsulation, and decapsulation, is significantly heavier than the equivalent operation in ML-KEM.