Game of Extermination

Aditya was fascinated as he looked around.

There is a wall in the shed that is completely dedicated to the pictures, accolades, participation and even the goals of the club for the coming academic year.

For the first time ever he felt genuine enthusiasm ever since he stepped in this college.

You can Aditya is the type of guy who has minimal enthusiasm about things. Sometimes, even the most entertaining and exciting things appear bland to him. And as long as it didn’t interest him, he never worked hard. You can even say that he is a minimum guy.

He always put in just enough effort to get by.

It applies to his grades, physique, appearance, and everything you can think of.

He never strained himself over things. The very first reason he picked mechanical is his fascination with the bicycle mechanism that he couldn’t understand at the age of eight and the mechanism inside the wall clock that made him feel excited.

But he never managed to get into any of those things and explore them as hobbies, because he couldn’t convince the typical Indian parents he had. Although they are pretty supportive most of the time, they didn’t want him to ‘waste’ too much time and money chasing hobbies.

And when this fear and hatred of the mosquitoes and insects came into his life, it trumped everything else and all he cared about was making his living environment insect-free making it his favorite hobby.

But when it came to select his group of choice, he involuntarily picked this, because this is the only one, he had any interest in.

Now, when he looked at all the enthusiastic students, their working environment, and from the messiness, he could guess how much effort they put in, he couldn’t help but smile.

In fact, he is so lost in his own thoughts, that he doesn’t even notice the mosquito that bit him and only realizes after the sting.

He was shocked and slapped his arm where the bloody insect stung and shook his head in disbelief.

‘What the hell happened to me?’ He thought to himself and at this moment Venkat came to him with an even more excited look.

“Come on, let’s go to the other room.” Venkat said.

Aditya blankly followed him while he looked around. Soon they arrived at another shed beside this one, a much larger one than the first.

There are a bunch of vehicles that looked like variants of a Dune Buggy parked in it.

Some of them are rusty and some looked relatively new. Apart from the buggies, there are two Quad-Bikes, three Go-karts parked beside them, and a vehicle that looks similar to that of a knock-off DIY Formula car.

There are boards hung to each vehicle with the competition it was made for the competitions it won, the years it participated, and so on. He took it all in. After some time, they came back to the first shed to take a form and fill it up. Besides the forms, there is a set of information.

They can take a test any day at lunch break for the next two weeks and it would be conducted in the classroom of the Sophomores of the Mechanical Engineering department.

And if they really want a proper demo, currently there are a bunch of sophomores going through some internal competition at after-school hours throughout this week and they could come and see, when he saw the timings, Aditya felt his eyes brighten up a bit.

There is a last instruction saying what they should study for the test and they exclusively stated that the test would be completely different for every day.

Aditya and Venkat took a picture of the details and went out.

They decided to go to the town to get the books for the book club that very same day.

And Aditya wanted to test something out, so he bought two boxes of Oreos after they were done with the book shopping.

They didn’t have to strive for long because there were two books in the list that were Telugu novels which have been best sellers for a long time, so they bought them and went back to the dorm.

Aditya finally sat down and asked Ram.

“What would happen if I activate the AIP(Attribute Improvement Package)?”

[It would be a similar experience to that of game round. You would be taken away from that point of time and then would return back to your original state.]

Aditya tried to take the AIP out of the inventory but the system didn’t allow it. He needs to use it if he wants to remove it from the inventory and with it occupying the whole slot, he couldn’t access the one slot he got after the first round.

As for the information regarding the attribute packages, not much is going around in the chatroom. Only people are complaining that they are dead tired and that is extremely dejecting. In fact, and many people are saying it is not even worth it.

But he couldn’t get any specific details as he asked directly in the chatroom. He is still not really willing to talk to others in the chatroom.

He would only talk if it is absolutely necessary. At this moment, he didn’t reach that state yet.

He would like to keep as little contact as possible with the rest of the group.

So, he decided to use the attribute package anyway. So, that night after dinner, he went to one of the common washrooms and used the package.

[ATTRIBUTE IMPROVEMENT PACKAGE IS BEING USED.

PLEASE SELECT THE ATTRIBUTE

Aditya looked at the three options in front of him and selected strength attribute. The reason is that if his plans work properly, it wouldn’t matter which attribute he chose and each would benefit in a different way.

He didn’t plan on making the plan fail and kept on running since he didn’t have any other choice.

Even though he shitting his pants went the start of the round, suddenly he is feeling pretty good about this stuff. All of a sudden, he suddenly felt his vision go blank and felt a strong suction force around his body.

Before he knew it, he reappeared in another grey area. It is like a large grey-colored room with gigantic walls. There is a circular hole of around three-feet diameter in the middle of it.

There is a large sledgehammer in the middle of it.

Ram suddenly appeared out of nowhere and this time he came in a real-life size form.

He is tall and robust. He is at least six feet and three inches tall.

“Damn, you are a total hunk even in that old man’s outfit. Just what did you eat when you grew up?”

[Nothing like the scrap you kids are eating. Anyway, listen closely. You have selected the Strength attribute. So, you are going to use that sledgehammer and smash something for a long time.]

“Smash what?”

[Something you hate. They would be coming out of that large hole and you would need to smash them. Personal advice, use your legs and back properly, if you do it wrong it will hurt pretty badly. So, be careful. The more time you spend here and the more things you smash, the more attribute points you will gain.

There is another thing you need to see.]

He paused and snapped his fingers and a holographic screen appeared.

[This is the ranking list of the people who used the strength attribute package before.]

Aditya looked at it and was shocked. There are at least five dozen names on that long list.

And beside every name, there is a number indicating the number shown beside it.

The first rank is actually the same guy who ranked first in the list.

The Soldier.

It seems like the more time he stayed the higher the ranking he got and it showed that the soldier stayed there for four hours straight.

Just a minute short of the four hours.

“How many attribute points did he gain?”

[You would know after you finish your turn.]

Aditya picked up the sledgehammer and tried to swing it a bit, but he was really unfamiliar with this.

[It begins now.]

Ram spoke and all of a sudden something crawled up from the hole.

Aditya looked at in horror. It is a large bed bug in the size of a basket ball coming out of the hole and he almost freaked out.

“Holy Fuck. Why the hell are you so perverted with this thing? What the fuck is actually wrong with you?”

He couldn’t help but curse out loud. He then picked up the hammer and roughly swung it toward the bed bug.

With a single smash, the bed bug was crushed into a paste.