Even Terry, with his encyclopedic knowledge of drone racing and custom model aircraft, hesitated when faced with the blueprint for the micro-quad Nick wanted. He spent his first morning just staring at the specs, completely unsure of where to even begin.
Though the prototype airframe was tiny—barely spanning the palm of an adult's hand—it crammed in a dizzying array of high-tier engineering. Beyond the core Swarm-Array networking firmware, it required automated flight control, optical target tracking, threat classification, independent terminal guidance, and a highly specialized micro-payload.
Managing the swarm communications wasn't the issue; Nick's core team had written the book on that. But the collision-avoidance logic and autonomous target acquisition couldn't be solved purely through software or hardware alone—they had to wage a war on both fronts simultaneously to have any hope of a breakthrough.
Right now, Nick was relying on Terry to iron out the mechanical and sensor bottlenecks. The absolute priority was enabling the micro-quad to map its immediate surroundings with zero latency. If the drone couldn't perceive a brick wall or a tree branch instantly, the automation logic was useless.
Then came the tactical targeting puzzle: how to detect and identify a hostile combatant, how to break through military-grade camouflage, and how to autonomously flag high-value assets like technicals, mortars, and rocket launchers.
In fairness, pieces of these technologies already existed across the defense sector. The real nightmare was miniaturizing the processing chips and sensors enough to fit onto a palm-sized chassis without tanking the drone's strict weight limits.
The moment Terry took ownership of the project, he completely vanished. He locked himself in the third-floor lab and didn't cross the threshold for a solid week.
Nick, however, didn't have the luxury of going dark. As much as he wanted to bury himself in the source code alongside Terry, the corporate side of the house was demanding his attention.
The most immediate pressure point was their upcoming Prime Day promotional event. While it wasn't the massive holiday shopping rush, the mid-summer event had steadily evolved into a critical milestone for major e-commerce platforms.
Every tech company in the country was treating it as a mid-year battleground. Major brands were pouring tens of millions of dollars into marketing campaigns for smart home appliances, smartphones, and audio gear, completely saturating the airwaves.
Compared to those corporate budgets, the million or two that Militech had scraped together for Prime Day ad placements was barely a drop in the bucket.
Fortunately, the organic hype surrounding the H1 was carrying the weight. The assistant had been on a non-stop sales tear since launch, so the moment consumers who had been on the fence heard that Militech was participating in the summer event, the hype spiked.
The burning question on the tech forums was the size of the discount. Nick's team kept the exact numbers under lock and key, refusing to leak the price until the clock struck midnight.
The moment the listing went live at $1,498, the community went wild. A clean $200 price drop on a premium piece of hardware was a massive deal.
Within sixty seconds of the launch window, the massive traffic wave completely locked up Militech's official web store and crashed their direct-to-consumer storefronts on several major retail platforms. It took an intense hour of emergency server maintenance by their DevOps team and the hosting platforms to get the digital pipes flowing again.
Exactly eleven minutes and fifty-one seconds into the sale, Tyler, who had been glued to the backend analytics monitor, leaped out of his chair with an ecstatic shout.
The rest of the marketing team erupted right alongside him, cheering and high-fiving across the room. Nick looked at the soaring numbers on the wall-mounted dashboard, letting out a long, slow breath before standing up to join the applause for his exhausted crew.
One hundred thousand units. Cracking six figures in under twelve minutes translated to roughly $150 million in gross revenue—a number that completely eclipsed every other consumer tech rollout that night.
Nick pulled out his phone, snapped a quick photo of the glowing analytics screen, and posted it to his personal X account with a simple caption: "You can sleep peacefully now."
A minute later, the official Militech corporate account quote-tweeted him, adding a cheeky comment: "Boss, the celebration dinner is on your corporate card!"
"No problem. Everyone gets a plus-one, and you pick the venue," Nick fired back immediately.
The banter between Nick and the brand account immediately triggered a wave of viral memes, congratulations from fans, and breaking coverage from tech blogs.
But while the mood in Tampa was celebratory, the atmosphere at the major smartphone brands was pure panic. Caught in a brutal market squeeze, their executive teams were anxiously watching their own lagging Prime Day numbers. Seeing Nick's viral victory lap only fueled their corporate envy; every legacy brand in the valley was left wondering how a startup had managed to capture lightning in a bottle so effortlessly.
"One hundred and fifty thousand!" Tyler roared again as the clock hit the twenty-seven-minute mark.
"If we hit two hundred thousand, late-night takeout is on me—order whatever you want!" Tyler shouted, waving his hand like a high-roller.
"Thank you, Williams! Long live Tyler!" the floor chanted.
Watching his team ride the adrenaline high, Nick stood up and gave a long stretch. He patted Tyler on the shoulder. "Keep an eye on the servers. I'm heading home to get some sleep."
Tyler spun around, his jaw dropping in absolute disbelief. "Are you out of your mind? It's the biggest night of the year and you're going to bed? How can you even think about sleeping right now?"
"Easy—I close my eyes. See you tomorrow," Nick joked, waving as he headed for the exit.
"Are you seriously walking out? You don't want to see the final tally?" Tyler called out over the noise.
"My sitting here isn't going to make the progress bar move any faster," Nick called back, turning to face the floor one last time. He raised his voice so everyone could hear him: "Make sure you guys set up a rotation so everyone gets some rest tonight; it's going to be a long day. I'm heading out, but I'll haul in breakfast for the morning shift."
With that, Nick stepped out into the quiet night. It wasn't that he didn't care about the milestone; he just didn't get swept up in the frantic energy of the sales floor. If the data was locked in, his time was better spent recovering. For the past two weeks, his schedule had been a brutal cycle of split-shifts between Terry's automation lab and executive corporate meetings.
Now that the launch risk was mitigated, he could finally turn his brain off and get a solid eight hours.
Based on the opening trajectory, total promotional sales were pacing to clear 500,000 units, completely obliterating their original high-end internal target of 250,000.
It was an undeniable victory, but the volume brought its own set of structural headaches.
For one, Tyler was going to be mourning the numbers. For a CFO who scrutinized every fraction of a percentage point, slashing $200 off their margins on half a million units was a deep, physical pain. They were leaving a massive pile of potential revenue on the table.
More critically, the surge was about to break their manufacturing supply chain. The factory floor in Tampa was already running three shifts at maximum capacity; throwing a massive order spike into the system was pure torture for the industrial engineers.
While the corporate office had cleared out secondary assembly lines and stockpiled components in anticipation of Prime Day, the actual demand was rendering those precautions completely inadequate.
Down at the factory, Steve—their VP of Manufacturing who had practically been living on the cleanroom floor—was undoubtedly going to be throwing chairs the moment he saw the morning reports.