The guilt started approximately five minutes after Robin left. Kairos stared at Ares's last message—the one about reporting categories—and felt like a traitor. She was over there meticulously planning the architecture of *their* project, and he had just secretly signed up to code for 48 hours straight on a different, secret project with his friends.
He had to tell her. But how?
**Kairos:** Hey, so remember how I said something came up?
**Ares:** Yeah? Everything okay?
**Kairos:** Yeah! Great, actually. So, funny story. A last-minute spot opened up for the CodeBlitz hackathon this weekend. You know, the big one.
The typing bubbles appeared. He held his breath.
**Ares:** Oh cool! Are you going to watch?
Kairos winced.
**Kairos:** Well. Sort of. I'm… going to be in it. My friends needed a fourth person. It was kind of an emergency.
The bubbles stayed there for a long, long time. Too long.
**Ares:** This weekend? The same weekend we just agreed to start mapping out our semester project?
**Kairos:** I know how it looks. But hear me out! The grand prize is a funded Google Play Console account and a year of cloud hosting. It's literally everything we'd need to actually launch CampusFix for real. Not just for a grade. I thought… I thought it could be for us.
More silence. He was sweating.
**Ares:** You should have asked me first.
There it was. No anger. Just a simple, firm statement that made him feel about two inches tall. She was right. He absolutely should have.
**Kairos:** You're right. I'm sorry. It was a split-second decision and Robin was in my face and the prize… I got excited. It was stupid.
Another agonizing pause.
**Ares:** It was. But the prize *is* good. And it's not like we can start coding the full thing this very second.
A tiny sliver of hope.
**Ares:** So. You're going to spend 48 hours coding something entirely different with your friends, and you're going to be completely useless to me by Sunday night. Is that the plan?
**Kairos:** …That's the plan.
**Ares:** You'd better win, Trevor. Or this entire weekend of you ghosting me is just you being flaky for no reason. And I don't do flaky.
It was the closest thing to a blessing he was going to get. It was also the most terrifying ultimatum of his life.
**Kairos:** We'll win. I promise. I'll code like my life depends on it. Because it kinda does.
**Ares:** See that you do. And Kairos?
**Kairos:** Yeah?
**Ares:** Good luck.
He let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. She was annoyed, but she wasn't dropping him. He could work with annoyed.
The next morning, the hackathon hall buzzed with a nervous, electric energy. Long tables were packed with students, a jungle of cables, laptops, and half-empty cans of energy drinks. The air hummed with the sound of frantic typing and low, strategic conversations.
Kairos found his team—Robin, Sam, and Drake—already commandeered a corner, their gear spread out like a military tech operation.
"Alright, code ninja, you're here," Robin said, clapping him on the shoulder. "We decided on the project. We're building 'Nexus'."
"It's an all-in-one academic organizer," Sam explained, taking charge of the explanation. He was the strategist. "It scrapes your course portal for deadlines, syncs with your personal calendar, and has a social layer where you can form study groups for specific assignments. No more missing deadlines or scrambling for last-minute help."
Kairos nodded, impressed. It was a solid, relatable idea. "I like it. Ambitious, but scoped for 48 hours. What's the stack?"
"Front-end in React Native for cross-platform," Drake, the front-end specialist, chimed in. "Back-end, we're thinking Node.js express and MongoDB. We need you on the back-end, Kairos. Building the API, the web scraper for the course portal, the auth system. The deep, dark, scary stuff."
Kairos cracked his knuckles. "Let's do it."
**Hour 3: The Honeymoon Phase**
The initial energy was euphoric. Ideas flew fast. Drake began crafting beautiful UI components. Sam outlined the database schema. Robin started building the presentation deck his role as "hype man" and project manager was crucial. Kairos set up the project repository, initialized the Node server, and began crafting the foundational API endpoints. Everything was smooth. They were geniuses.
**Hour 6: The First Wall – "Module Not Found"**
The first major hurdle hit Kairos. The course portal scraper. To automate login and data fetching, he was using a library called 'puppeteer'.
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
He ran the script. A red error screamed back in the terminal.
'Error: Cannot find module 'puppeteer'
"Seriously?" he muttered. He'd just installed it. He ran 'npm install puppeteer' again. Same error. For twenty minutes, he descended into a classic dependency hell clearing the npm cache, deleting the 'node_modules' folder, reinstalling everything. The team's progress slowed as they waited for the core functionality to be unlocked.
**The Fix:** Sam, glancing over, asked the simplest question. "Is it in your 'package.json'?" Kairos checked. It wasn't. He'd installed it without the '--save' flag. A rookie mistake. He added it, reinstalled, and the script finally ran. A collective sigh of relief went around the table. The first crisis was averted by a simple oversight.
**Hour 12: The Authentication Abyss**
Kairos moved on to user authentication. He decided on JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for its simplicity. He wrote the login endpoint, the sign up logic, and the middleware to verify tokens on protected routes. It worked perfectly in Postman. He high-fived Drake so they could connect the front-end login screen.
Drake sent the first login request. '401 Unauthorized'.
They spent the next two hours in a maddening loop of frustration. The front-end said it was sending the token. The back-end said it wasn't receiving it. They checked headers, Axios configurations, CORS settings. The problem was invisible, a ghost in the machine. Robin brought them coffee and snacks, playing the supportive role as morale began to dip.
**The Fix:** Kairos, bleary-eyed, added more console logs than he'd ever admit to. Finally, he saw it. Drake was sending the token in the 'Authorization' header as 'Bearer [token]'. But Kairos's middleware was looking for it in a custom header called 'auth-token'. A miscommunication in the API contract. A single line of code changed from 'const token = req.header('auth-token');' to 'const token = req.header('Authorization')?.replace('Bearer ', '');' and suddenly, magically, it worked. The victory felt monumental. They were in!
**Hour 18: The Scraper's Revenge**
With auth working, Kairos turned back to the scraper. It worked on his machine. But when Sam tried to run it, it failed. The portal's login page had a slightly different HTML structure on Sam's device. The selector '#username' Kairos used didn't exist for Sam; it was '#user-name'.
The problem was bigger than one field. The course portal was a legacy, inconsistent mess. It would look different for different students based on their departments and year. Their entire core feature was breaking.
Panic set in. This could be a project-killer.
**The Pivot:** They huddled up. "This isn't scalable," Sam said, ever the pragmatist. "We can't write a scraper for every possible variation. We need to pivot."
Kairos felt a wave of despair. They'd wasted so much time. But then Drake suggested, "What if we make it manual? The user has to input their deadlines themselves."
"That sucks," Robin countered. "The automation was the cool part."
Kairos had an idea. "What if we make it *semi*-automatic? We provide a super-easy, step-by-step guide for users to find their assignment deadlines on the portal themselves, and then they just copy-paste them into our app. We save them time on organization, even if we don't automate the scraping. We focus on the UI and the social features."
It was a compromise. It wasn't as sleek, but it was honest, doable, and still solved the core problem. The team agreed. The pivot was underway. It felt like they'd cheated death.
**Hour 24: The Phone Call**
It was in the middle of this frantic pivot, as Kairos was ripping out the scraper code and building a new, simplified deadline input API, that his phone rang. An unknown number.
"Mr. Trevor? This is Maintenance. We're outside your room about that leak. You need to let us in."
The sink. He had completely, utterly forgotten. The real world had invaded their digital bubble.
"I..I'm not there right now," he stammered, drawing confused and slightly irritated looks from his teammates.
"Well, we're on the schedule. If you're not here, we'll have to reschedule. The next available slot is… next Thursday."
Next Thursday? His room would be a biological hazard by then.
"NO! Wait, five minutes! Just five minutes!" He slammed his laptop shut. "I have to go," he said to his friends, his voice thick with apology. "The sink… it's an emergency."
Robin stared, his face a mixture of disbelief and utter exhaustion. "Dude. You have got to be kidding me."
"He's not," Sam said flatly, not even looking up from his screen. "Of course it's flooding. Go. Fix your aquatic nightmare. We'll hold down the fort. But you owe us."
Kairos sprinted across campus, the cool night air a shock to his system. He arrived gasping, let the maintenance guys in, and stood by anxiously as they fixed the leak in under ten minutes with a wrench and some new washers.
As they left, he stood in the sudden silence of his room. The drip was gone. The crisis was averted. But he felt a world away from the hackathon hall. He was exhausted, behind, and had left his team in the lurch.
He pulled out his phone. A message from Robin lit up the screen.
**Robin:** The API is throwing a 500 error on the new deadline endpoint whenever we send a date. We think it's a timezone parsing issue. Hurry back, we need you.
And one from Ares, sent an hour ago.
Ares: How's it going?
He looked at the messages. He was being pulled in every direction. He took a deep breath, locked his door, and started running back to the hall. The night was far from over. The code was waiting, and it was merciless.The MVP wasn't going to build itself.