The following Tuesday, the atmosphere in the Advanced Networking Lab was tense. The “Final Sprint”—a grueling six-hour timed coding challenge—was underway. In this arena, your keyboard was your weapon, and your logic was your shield.

Aarav sat at Station 01, his movements rhythmic and robotic. He was currently thirty minutes ahead of the expected pace, his terminal a blur of clean, efficient C++ code. He felt a rare sense of peace.

Then, he hit the ‘Enter’ key to execute a test script.

Instead of the expected output, his high-end noise-canceling headphones—plugged into the workstation—erupted with a high-pitched, distorted version of “Baby Shark.”

Doo doo doo doo doo doo.

Aarav flinched, his hand jerking on the mouse.

He looked to his left.

Three rows down, Navya was buried in her monitors, her face a mask of faux-concentration, but the slight, rhythmic tremor of her shoulders gave her away.

She was laughing.

Aarav didn’t get angry. Anger was a logical fallacy. Instead, he pulled his headphones off, let the muffled “Baby Shark” continue to play to the empty air, and opened a secondary terminal.

“Childish,” he muttered.

He didn’t report her. That was for amateurs.

Instead, he executed a pre-written script he’d designed for “emergencies.” He knew Navya’s weakness: she relied on a high-sensitivity gaming mouse for her rapid-fire navigation.

He breached her local driver through the shared lab subnet—a vulnerability she’d left open because she was too busy uploading her “Baby Shark” payload.

Navya’s Perspective:

She was just about to finalize her encryption module when her cursor suddenly lurched to the top of the screen.

She pulled the mouse down.

The cursor went up.

“What the—?” she whispered.

She moved the mouse left; the cursor zipped right.

Aarav had inverted her X and Y axes.

But he didn’t stop there.

He set a timer: every five minutes, the inversion would flip back to normal for exactly sixty seconds—just long enough to give her hope—before reversing again.

She looked over at Aarav.

He was staring at his screen, his expression as blank as a fresh hard drive.

She grit her teeth, her knuckles turning white as she tried to fight the inverted controls. It was like trying to write a poem in a mirror while standing on her head. Her coding speed plummeted.

“Malhotra,” she hissed loud enough for him to hear.

Aarav didn’t turn.

He simply typed a command that sent a single pop-up notification to her screen, obscuring her code:

> [System]: Optimization is the art of not getting distracted by nursery rhymes. 3.5 hours remaining. Good luck with the hardware failure.

Navya realized she couldn’t call the lab assistant without admitting she’d started the war by hacking his audio driver. She was trapped in her own prank.

She spent the next three hours coding with her mouse upside down, fueled by pure, unadulterated spite, while Aarav finished his work an hour early and spent the remaining time reading a digital manual titled:

“How to Deal with Malfunctioning Peripherals.”

The war had officially escalated.