Ben grabbed Olympia around the waist and screamed in fear. She quickly registered the falling and used her enormous body to shield the civilian as much as she could, kicking away Mama mole as they fell.

'Almost 1,500 feet until the ground starts to angle,' Ben calculated, 'then another 3,000 feet until the ground is relatively flat enough to fight comfortably on. We'll have to roll, but the whiplash of spinning so much could seriously disorient me. I need to think-'

As Ben fell, the area his sight covered dropped with him, and just a few thousand feet beyond where he projected the best fight could take place was the crumpled remains of a van, somehow still on its wheels. It was absolutely destroyed, every window broken and every metal piece dented inside and out. The passengers were sitting in their seats, beaten down by debris, but no serious impalements. Katherine had a steadily bleeding nose from a direct impact by the airbag, but otherwise, it was a very successful crash. Their target, Papa mole, was underneath the car, one of his arms crushed inside the wheel well with the donut.

But the hybrid villain was still alive, his heartbeat still pumping blood through his vile body.

'Thank god they're alive,' Ben thought as he reached terminal velocity with the heroine cushion. 'Now l can torture them myself.'

The first impact didn't hurt, thanks to Olympia taking the brunt of it, but it did put the two into a spin. Every bouncing impact after that turned the spin into a ride inside centrifuge hell. Ben could actually see his blood moving in his body, congealing harder at the furthest point from center. Thanks to his clever use of Olympia, that was his back, a place where it was safe for blood to pool.

But they reached the part of the ride where the bouncing became a roll, and Ben had to take some of the hits along with the heroine.

Olympia's healing aura was projected around them at full force to survive the fall, but Ben could see it was draining her stamina. Her grip around him was weakening, and the muscles she had braced for impact were starting to loosen.

Mama mole didn't fare much better, the harsh ground tearing at her bullet wounds like sandpaper on bread. They weren't even halfway down the hole and the hybrid already resembled ground beef.

The pain was excruciating, but the worst part of it was that he would have to live with the injury like a normal person. The camera watched him fall, Olympia was a witness, and the kids were doubtless stand witness the destruction of his body. He couldn't just repair everything in the med bay, it would be suspicious for his highly damaged body to suddenly repair itself. He would have to go through the hospital system and get check-ups for months afterwards, playing it off with his natural regeneration.

All of this was going through Ben's head as he performed a barrel roll with Olympia, keeping his head pulled forwards so as not to crack his skull on the bedrock. Olympia's healing aura was keeping her cognizant and her armored spandex was keeping her from the sandpaper affect of the rock, but her aura was starting to wane along with her strength. She may have been the world's best active healer, but she's supposed to be a backline fighter. For her power to be used best, she needed concentration, something she lacked when fist fighting with mole people. She had been burning through her energy reserves, and it showed.

Ben's primary fear happened when they were getting close to the bottom of the decline, Olympia's head jerked back and cracked her skull on the hard rock ridge made by the digging machine. Like turning off a light, her healing aura disappeared and she let go of Ben, but he didn't let go of her. He grabbed the giant woman and squeezed her tight, trying and failing to position her correctly. As his shoulders and back took a pound of flesh from the sandstone ramp, he finally got on top.

Ben rode the giant woman like a surfboard toboggan, using her shoulders and butt as footholds while pulling her hair to keep her head up to not flip his new ride. He had to balance really well, the unevenness of her flesh and the lost traction of her suit making his position no top very precarious.

The ride was far from comfy, and the air blowing past Ben's open back and arms was burning in a dozen different ways. But this innovative mode of transportation got both of them to the bottom of the cavern with less injury on his side, although Olympia's entire front half looked like lasagna with extra tomato paste.

Ben stepped off the superheroine and onto the moist rock of the newly carved cave. Groundwater was already starting to spill in, but the cave went on for quite a while at varying levels. The place wouldn't fill up with water anytime soon, but the ground was extra slippery.

Ben could see the kids in the van a little over a football field away, even though the cave was almost entirely pitch black. The curvature of the cave was just enough to stop all sunlight from getting in, and Ben needed to be aware of that fact.

Grumbling the whole way, the village councilman flipped Olympia onto her well-preserved back and got a handful of her blonde hair in his hands. With agonizing pain in his muscles, he started pulling her further into the cave towards the kids. When she woke up, he would have everyone gather around for some quick repairs, then do the thing no supervillain would dream of doing:

Wait to be rescued.

As he dragged the herculean heroine towards his team, Ben tried to imagine how long it would take for people to realize they were down there. The camera on the stands was running, but it wasn't broadcasting anywhere. They would have to manually check the films to figure it out, which could take days. Of course, there would eventually be some heroes or superhumans who could make the trip down the tunnel, but they would be super cautious for traps. The groundwater could sustain them during that time, and food wasn't too big an issue, but no doubt the parents would be worried about them.

There was one hope for an earlier rescue, but even Ben couldn't tell if it was possible.

Garrett's phone was the only one that survived the crash intact. It was the updated model Nokia made specifically for hybrid superhumans whose abilities tend to disturb phones. If his phone could somehow get service down the tunnel, they could call emergency services for a ride out of there.

"Try to take my gun, you stupid bitch," Ben griped, containing his fury for the sake of healing everyone's injuries. "I shoulda just kicked you down here. I can still chop your head off. Fucking trying anything with me again, I fucking dare you."

Ben approached the vehicle with an ungodly malice now that the childish source of all his problems was within strangling distance. He kept a cool head, reminding himself that teenagers were reckless idiots one and all, but decided to make sure the situation couldn't get any worse.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The car was horribly misshapen, but mostly intact. The broken glass was scattered across the tunnel, but all the pieces were still in place and the internal lights were still on despite the battery leaking acid and water. The gas tank had split open and splashed everywhere, but the groundwater leaking in from all sides had dispersed the petroleum enough to make it non-threatening. Even if something did ignite the van, there wasn't enough flammable material to catch the whole thing aflame. Thankfully, the piece he needed was still there, and still intact thanks to being so centered.

The former villain dropped the heroine, letting her cracked skull crack a bit more on the hard ground, and circled the van until he was just over the hood. He reached underneath the horribly cracked metal plate and grabbed the dipstick from the cracked engine, sliding it out with a metallic sling. He shook the oil off a bit and then folded it in half to get more structural strength, then pushed it under clinched metal to twist it into shape.

When he was done, Ben had a twisted metal dipstick with one very specific use.

Ben walked around the car to the rear left side, where a certain hybrid bastard had his arm wrapped around an axle. The mole person's head was just a little bit under the main body of the car, so Ben had to lay down and snake his arm through the skin and bone fragments with his twisted metal dipstick firmly on his middle finger. The mole's vitals remained unconscious while he was doing this, and Ben even poked him a few times to see if too much stimulation would bother him.

When the councilman was satisfied, he positioned the jagged metal drain snake right at the tip of the mole person's ear canal and wiggled it in enough to get a good start.

With the most sudden use of force Ben could muster, he jabbed the metal in all the way down to the knuckle, then ripped it out.

Papa mole stirred, his unconscious slipping away as his body's emergency systems flooded with every hormone they had to respond to the danger. Ben plunged once more before the claws started to move and the eyes started to flicker. His voice started to grumble, then groan, then rose in pitch until it was just a squeal like he was having a nightmare. This squeal turned bloody and violent as all of Papa moles nerves lit his brain up like fireworks on the fourth of July.

But Ben could tell this was the dying scream of a tortured animal. The mole person had significant internal bleeding from the crash and fall, but they could have lived if left alone. And he definitely could have survived if Olympia did the classic hero move and healed him with what little energy she had left. Maybe he could turn his life around and not be a sick bastard cannibal, and maybe he could have lived peacefully into the future with a loving wife and son.

But Ben wasn't about to let this slide. His little drain cleaning maneuver had gone all the way to the brain and pierced things that jagged metal should never touch. As long as the giantess's underlying power manipulation hadn't changed, complex brain functions were just a little bit out of her abilities to repair.

Unfortunately, the daddy mole's dying thrashes was shaking the car, and all the kids inside. This jostling managed to stir Gary, who had the least amount of injuries out of everyone. He woke with a start into the pitched blackness at the bottom of a very long tunnel, and the dying screams of a human-sized mole with brain problems.

Gary panicked, and rightfully so. This situation was so far from ordinary, anyone without experience in the abstract would have a hard time grasping the chain of events that got them there.

However, the dual sounds of a dying animal and a crying teenager was bugging Ben, who was all bugged-out from the day's catastrophes. With weakened limbs and exhausted will, Ben called out down the tunnel.

"Kids!" he rasped. "Kids!" Are you there!"

Gary responded to the sound of Ben's voice, making incoherent blubbering noises that were supposed to be responses.

Ben made some light scraping sounds as he got to his feet, simulating something approaching from far away, then he shouted, "The van! I see the van! And everyone's okay! Mostly.... Gary! My god, Gary! What happened?! Why did you guys come back?!"

The teen boy couldn't properly utter words, he just cried as the life-threatening fall and near-death experiences caught up to him. His huge body heaved sobs of distraught on a level of personal distress only pampered children could conjure.

Ben had to turn on caring councilman mode just to deal with the situation, "It's okay! Everything's okay! The moleman is trapped under the car and Olympia is here! Once she wakes up, she'll heal everyone all at once. I promise!"

It was a lie, Olympia barely had the healing aura to correct her own injuries, but with some time to recover, she could probably do enough to make the kids believe they'd been healed.

Ben already knew the door was busted beyond repair and opening it was a mug's game, so he just reached through the broken glass and put a reassuring hand on Gary's shoulder. The big boy hyperventilated in the faded overhead light of the car. He was breathing so heavily, it shook Garrett awake as well, who didn't seem to recognize the danger they were in and just looked around confusedly.

Now all Ben had to do was wait, which he decided to do it in the most minimal comfort possible. Keeping up appearances, he circled the van while Garrett kept a hand on Gary to pick up the massive heroine and drag her to the van. The two boys recognized her immediately and followed Ben's plan to let her rest on one of the seats. They helped lift the enormous woman into the vehicle, getting her mostly on the center row as they moved into the back. Each movement elicited squeaks of pain from the varmint under the car, but Ben was happy with it.

With the heroine in the car, Ben sat on the open door and relaxed, feeling the mess of the day's trouble stick to him like soda. He would have so much cleaning to do when he got back home, it was almost unreal. Absolutely he would be milking this travesty for every vacation day he could get.

He was so distracted, he almost forgot to make the phone call. He asked Garrett for his phone to try calling from down the tunnel, and the snake boy gave it willingly, along with his passcode. Ben told the boys to stay there and not disturb either of the unconscious teens.

He knew there was no brain or spinal damage, he just didn't want to deal with more crying children right now.

Ben slogged his way back to the opening of the tunnel where it was light enough to see again, then started an arduous climb up a gradually steepening incline. He held the phone high while his wet tennis shoes struggled to find traction on the muddy, rocky surface. He tried to remember what cell towers were in the area and what kind of coverage everyone was getting prior to the mole incident, when a single bar of service ticked on Garrett's phone.

The councilman felt relief for the first time since setting out on this horrible adventure, and climbed a little more to secure as strong a signal as he could.

Ben called 911 and his call was picked up immediately. He cried into the phone like a bitch that mole people showed up and attacked his student, then attacked him, and now he was down a deep hole, "and I don't know WHAT'S going on!"

The helpline stayed on the phone with him until they got confirmation that a flying hero would arrive there in under an hour and to hold tight.

Ben cried, "I have to go back! There are kids here! We're all scared! Just get here as fast as you can!"

He started back down the steep tunnel, losing signal as he went until the line died. He then turned on the light of the phone and stumbled his way back to the van.

The mole person finally stopped screeching when he got back, but now Stanley and Katherine were awake and trying to fix the situation.

"I managed to get a call through," Ben said with a facade of calm. "Emergency services knows we're here and they're sending people to come rescue us. It'll take about an hour. We just need to sit tight until then."

There were tears of joy and relief as the kids finally got word that everything was going to be okay. Katherine and Stanley had gotten out of the front seats, so Ben took the driver's seat and pressed back against the headrest.

"Are you okay?" Katherine asked, the first to observe Ben's condition. "How did you get down here with us?"

"The question is:" Ben responded sourly, "What am I going to do with you all once we get out?"

"What?" Katherine backed away slightly.

"You drove off a cliff and made me jump in after you," Ben explained very succinctly. "I am never going to let you live this down."