The husband and wife duo cautiously observed the actions of Shaggy as it roamed around the house, going in and out of their visual range.

'Srak' 'Srak' 'Srak'

'Grrr'

'Srak' 'Srak' 'Srak'

'Woof'

Shaggy began to brash against a door with its sharp nails as splinters of wood fell down. It tried to slam its body against the door a few times but when it failed to budge it, Shaggy resumed back to scraping away on its surface.

"Don't blindly rush to your death. Let me think up a plan." Prakash anxiously caught Anita who was releasing a murderous aura and was about to charge at Shaggy with reckless abandon.

The door that Shaggy was trying to break through was the door that led into the room where Akash had been sleeping before the shrinking incident occurred.

It seemed as if Shaggy had temporarily given up on trying to eat them due to all the fine cotton dust in their vicinity that was the cause of its earlier sneezing fit and planned to eat the other source of aroma coming through the door.

'Click'

As they heard a certain sound, it felt as if their souls had left their bodies.

While in the process of grating against the door, one of Shaggy's forelegs accidentally pushed against the doorknob in a clockwise direction and removed its hold with the door frame. It now only needed a single push to fully open the door.

"Don't you dare!" With a shrill bellow, Anita slid off the edges of the sofa, landed on the tiled floor and rolled at the moment of landing to decrease the impact of her downward momentum. She sprang up to her knees immediately and began to maniacally charge towards the giant dog with reddish murderous eyes.

"Shit…" Prakash backtracked a few steps, began to sprint in another direction and jumped off. He barely managed to grab ahold of the edges of a tea table that was placed adjacent to their sofa and quickly climbed up. His brain was thinking up numerous ideas in such a tremendous speed that it felt as if his brain was on fire.

Prakash spotted a pen stand, a box of sweets that were wrapped up with rubber bands, a stack of newspapers and a packet of chips.

"Ugh…" Prakash grunted as he tilted the pen stand.

"Happ.." Veins bulged on his arms as he lifted one end of the pen stand and made it fall sideways.

'Crash'

Prakash then proceeded to remove a rubber band that was wrapped over the box of sweets. His hands had become slightly red as he tried to remove the stretched rubber band.

Rubber bands were generally used to wrap around sweet boxes to hold the lid in place on the box. It was a safety measure that was generally employed since the sweets had a high concentration of oil and ghee in them that were good lubricants due to which there was a chance that the lid might come off during travelling or during transportation.

His muscles bulged as he pulled the rubber band that was already stretched taut as it was wrapped around the box.

'Thud'

Prakash fell on the ground as the rubber band finally came off.

He then noticed that Anita was already more than near enough to the dog that its ears perked up and its head snapped back in her direction. There was just a distance of 3 feet between the two. Shaggy left its hold on the door, got on all fours on the floor and lunged towards Anita.

As angry as she was, Anita didn't completely lose her sanity. She reduced her charging speed so that her body would have enough room to change direction at the last possible moment.

The doorknob was completely turned when Shaggy brought its legs on the floor from its previous hold on the door. There was a thin gap that had now opened between the door and the door frame through which the inner room could be seen.

It felt as if each pen weighed more than one-third of his body weight as Prakash lifted them up and began to unscrew the tips. It was a race for time, Shaggy was about to pounce at Anita and he had to do something about it.

After unscrewing the tip, Prakash removed the refill from the pen and ran towards one edge of the tea table with the rubber band in tow.

The tea table had four legs to support itself which elongated all over to its top and presented themselves as small stumps with some decorative symbols inlaid in them. It was something that Prakash had once obtained in an auction; it was an antique that dated back to the Mughal Empire.

Prakash no longer cared about such meaningless stuff, harnessed the rubber band around the stump, loaded it with the refill and stretched it. The pointed nib was facing towards the giant dog, and Prakash gritted his teeth as he desperately pulled the rubber band as much as he could.

His feet were starting to slip on the wooden surface as there were small traces of sweat forming on the soles of his feet, but Prakash desperately tried to balance himself as he focused his aim at Shaggy.

He had one shot, an execution time of less than a second, the failure of which would result in the horrific death of his beloved wife in the jaws of a monster.

"Aaaaaa…" Prakash bellowed to raise his fighting spirit and launched his projectile.

'Swoosh'

Like an artillery that was blasted off into the skies, the refill blazed through the air carrying with it an imposing momentum.

Shaggy bent its knees and lunged at the delicious munchkin that presented itself on its dinner table; its tongue could already taste the meat's savoury flavour, its sharp nose increasing the height of its hunger with the relays of that mesmerizing aroma.

Anita saw a gaping maw travelling towards her at breakneck speeds. Before it could reach within a foot of her, a pungent smell wafted out of its open jaws filled with deadly canine teeth.

It was at this moment a refill that seemed to be made of plastic flew through the air at speeds beyond its sensory perception and hit its ears.

The refill seemed to have turned sideways in the air during its flight, so it was the shaft portion that hit the ears of the giant dog.

The damage dealt by this plastic projectile launched with the desperate might of Prakash dealt to Shaggy….almost no damage.

As if a plastic refill used inside a ball-point pen could hurt through the hide of a German Shepherd when it was launched by a 6-centimetre tall munchkin, and its point of contact was somewhere along the shaft and not the tip.

But, humans were clever and cunning. Sure, the amount of physical damage dealt by this projectile was close to none but as someone who understood well and witnessed the growth of Shaggy from its childhood, Prakash was gunning for an entirely different objective.

As something foreign suddenly touched its ears, its ears immediately drooped in response and it jerked its head up and brought one of its forelegs and tried to check the area on its head region around the ears.

For a moment there, Shaggy seemed to have forgotten about Anita as it kept rubbing one of its hind legs in the regions around its head and neck, trying to remove that foreign object that was lodged in between the hairs on its doggy fur.

'Now!'

Anita made use of this chance and raced towards its tail and began to scale up on all fours as she clutched the hair on its fur and made ample use of them to manoeuvre.

Before it could successfully remove that refill that was stuck on its head, Shaggy felt something crawling along its tail and its body perked up in fright. Its head turned towards its tail and tried to reach the creature that was climbing on it.

Shaggy couldn't quite reach Anita as it began to spin in place as its head chased after its tail, more particularly, Anita who was on its tail.

Anita carefully positioned herself so that she wouldn't end up in the jaws of Shaggy, waited for a few moments and when the opportunity presented itself, she jumped into the air. Her cold calculating eyes had murderous rage spilling out of them.

Everything elapsed in the fraction of a second.

Shaggy was spinning in place as it tried to catch the creature on its tail with its mouth (Which it couldn't quite reach) when a small jump from Anita's side made her land squarely on its face beyond its wildest expectations. It was a last ditch counterattack of its prey.

As Anita flew, she clenched her fists and brought her knees closer to her body. Just before she was about to hit Shaggy's face, she kicked with her leg like a compressed spring that was fully released from its hold.

A muffled sound leaked out of her mouth due to the resulting shock as her left leg directly impacted upon the unguarded left eye of Shaggy.

"Awuuu…aee…aee" Shaggy cried out in pain as one of its forelegs swiped before its face in reflex.

After kicking at its left eye, Anita had just caught onto the eyelids of its left eye in preparation to her next attack when a powerful impact slammed upon her body as she flew a couple of feet in the air and fell on the ground.

'Rip'

Thankfully her fall was cushioned by a small puff of cotton that was sprawled all over the place when Shaggy rampaged earlier but the severity of her injuries was unknown.

"Awoooooo"

Shaggy howled in pain as more than half of its left eyelid was torn off by Anita when its foreleg hit her. Shaggy rolled around the floor a few times, howled many times in pain and slowly rubbed the soft underneath of its forelegs on its injured left eye as it rested its head on the floor to prevent excessive bleeding.

'Puchi'

"Take that you ungrateful mutt!" Prakash roared as he pushed the sharp end of another refill into the right eye of Shaggy.