Merciless

Quickly they arrived at the next kid, his movements had already gone limp. His teeth were battering against one another uncontrollably and threatened to bite off his own tongue.

Ambitan sprinted to his right while Kent took his left. Once they reached the kid, they each grabbed onto their respective side of the collar before tugging.

'This isn't fast enough!' Ambitan thought in a panic.

At the rate they were going, the collars were going to cause brain death in everyone else before they had a chance to remove even half of the collars.

'Plan, plan, plan,' Ambitan freaked out.

Then a lightbulb went off in Ambitan's head.

Suddenly, Ambitan abandoned Kent by himself before rushing over to where Martin's drying corpse lay.

Ambitan then riffled through Martin's pockets in search of another remote control, 'surely they wouldn't only have one set right?'

Ambitan withdrew a beaten phone from Martin's pocket, a salvaged relic that relied on the odd data towers that were attuned to that particular wavelength.

Frantically he pressed Martin's crusted, bloody fingerprint against the scanner, letting it read before hurriedly flipping through it.

There was an alarming amount of pornography, but that wasn't the concern and Ambitan flipped past it.

Sweat dripped down his neck from the beating sun, and his palms also started to perspire under the pressure.

Scrolling through, none of the applications seemed out of place, as a matter of fact, Ambitan was at least remotely with all of them to a certain extent. It seemed as if Ambitan really had been wasting his time by attempting this last-ditch effort.

The intrusive thoughts swarmed in again, smelling the blood in the water, 'If you had only stuck with your initial plan then perhaps you would've saved a couple more of them. Well, now they all die.'

Mournfully, Ambitan slowly surveyed the kids, kids that would never get a chance to even seize a chance for themselves, not too far apart from himself as a matter of fact.

Numbly, his finger still went through the floor, blindly swiping through to see if there was anything of help.

Then suddenly, Ambitan remembered a fatal flaw in his thinking.

'If these people are underground, they wouldn't go through the trouble of developing actual apps, it'll most likely be some sort of bootleg download tucked away.'

And sure enough, upon further investigation in the downloads folder, Ambitan stumbled upon a rather poorly named file.

Or greatly named depending on one's perspective.

A completely inconspicuous file titled 'Child_Lock' and while this could've been an old form of parental controls back in the times when that actually mattered, it was most likely some back alley programmer who had some sick, ironic sense of humor.

Reaching into and opening the file it activated to reveal a grisly beaver logo with a loading bar. It spun slowly, far too slowly.

As if it would help it load faster Ambitan rapidly mashed his fingers against the screen, like if he were to tap faster then it would encourage the phone to work more efficiently as well.

The bar progressed agonizingly slowly and Kent screamed in frustration, "What's taking so long?"

As if complaining were the solution, the bar sprinted to the finish line to reveal an on/off switch as well as a list of numbers to call.

Without a moment to think, Ambitan had already flipped the switch to deactivate the collars.

The electric currents immediately stopped flowing out of the shock collars but the current was still running its course throughout their bodies.

Gradually it dissipated though due to the grounding effects of the Earth. But nonetheless, the collars had done their work.

Some of the more resilient kids were struggling to stand up by themselves, and whenever Ambitan approached to help them up they snarled, clearly distrusting him despite how he worked to free them.

But that was no water off of Ambitan's back, it stung a little sure, but it was to be expected of course.

Trust is rare after all.

The mission hadn't been accomplished though. Ambitan thought that he had surpassed the expectations that the Faceless had set for him because rather than just gathering information, he had actually done something rather than sit around and wait for others to take action.

Collecting himself, he turned his back on the kids walking back to the bar, hopefully, there would be someone to direct him with further directions once he arrived.

If they were lucky, the kids would be able to get out and sort of work together to carve out their own little niche for themselves.

However, it was entirely possible for them to just get recaptured by the Gnashers once again and put back to work.

Worse than that they could even get put to death due to them being recorded escapees if they really were captured.

But nonetheless, Ambitan still turned his back on them, there was only so much he could do after all.

Now all they could do was offer up prayers for Lady Luck.

His footsteps dragged through the dirt and the rest of the kids fought off the rest of the spasms, still resigned to lying down on the floor, still unable to fully control their movements.

Ambitan's figure slowly disappeared between the heaps of garbage, slowly shrinking out of sight from the kids.

Slowly he made his back through the streets, this time taking more time to factor in what Virgil had told him.

The streets were full of scum, off to his right there was a father down on his knees, pleading for his life in the face of a loan shark.

"Please! I'll pay you back! You know I'm good for it!" he begged.

"Fuck off!" the loan shark barked. He then proceeded to wind up his hand before slapping the father.

Unprepared for the hit, he took it in its entirety, face reeling from the impact with a red-stained tooth popping out and rolling into the street.

"Daddy!" screamed his daughter.

But the mother still restrained her, holding her back before leading her away from what was about to occur.

And no matter what Ambitan felt about the situation he was still helpless about what then happened.