After resting above the surface for a while, the party finally decided to head back down. On the way down, they encountered no monsters, and upon arriving in the town began looking for a quest. To their surprise, finding a quest took longer than at the village. This was because there were more adventurers in the town than there were back in Ribbit, so a lot of the quests had already been completed.

  Ultimately, after some searching, they eventually managed to snag a quest. The quest came from the lakeweed harvesters, who sold said weeds to frogs that focused on processing them to make the greenish leather the party had seen.

  The problem that the harvesters faced was that none of their workers, who were usually family members or single individuals hired, would venture near the nearby forests, which were composed of large weeds. According to the head harvester, the weeds had recently been occupied by snakes, which kept attacking his workers. So, the party was hired to eliminate as many snakes as possible.

  The easiest part about the entire quest was that the locations of the forests were easily found. However, the problem that arose was that they couldn’t blast away at the small forest of long lakeweeds, since the frogs needed them. That said, it wasn't a difficult problem to solve.

  To be precise, the exact problem was that the snakes hid themselves by attaching to the lake's seaweed or residing in holes in the ground. These snakes only attacked when someone got close, which made things annoying. Sure, the party could head inside the small forest, with their shields active, and try to bait them and kill each snake, but that would take too long. Not that they could complain too much, since that's what they had seen other adventurers do and were actually a bit thankful that they didn't have to. Additionally, the party wanted to at least fight some of the snakes, as they sought to learn their names and any potential attacks they might have.

  Walking into the forest of lakeweed with their shields up, the trio was eventually attacked by the first type of snake. Three dark green snakes appeared from three large and flat weeds, aiming straight for them. Their flat bodies had odd patterns like the weeds they had been attached to, which kept the snakes hidden from the party, at least if they didn’t use very direct magic to detect them.

  Upon striking, the three snakes revealed long fangs dripping with bluish liquid, which the trio assumed was poison, and quickly found that it was poison. After crushing the original three snakes, Arctur had released his shield, and a fourth snake had appeared out of nowhere and bitten him. Not that the green man cared, since he had meant to let it happen.

  “Hmm, it is some sort of poison to slow your speed and reflexes,” Arctur said as he grabbed the snake, whose head was still attached to his arm.

  The snakes weren't that big and were maybe the size of a forearm. This meant that the green man easily grabbed its head and squished the creature with a burst of green energy.

  “Looks like not much vitality either, so we should be able to kill them with ease,” Alexion added.

  Continuing to move through the small forest of weeds and killing a few more of the Lurking Weed Snakes, the party was finally attacked by the second type of snake. Appropriately named, the Bullet Hole Snake shot out of small round hole in the ground. These snakes were incredibly dark and were of similar size to the weed snakes, but instead of being flat, they had rounded bodies. The snakes smacked into their shields with speed and force, their bodies glowing a dark color as they did so.

  “Huh, that’s new, their magic is trying to break apart the shield’s magic, it's like acid but also not really,” Adriana said as she inspected the speck of darkness now prevalent on her blue shield.

  “It’s a nice combination, the bullet snakes tear down your shield with sheer force and magic, while the weed snakes can slow you down when the shield is down,” Arctur added as he controlled the nearby weeds to crush one of the bullet snakes.

  “By the way, Art, can you not detect all these guys through the plants or the ground?” Alexion asked his green friend.

  “Huh, I guess I can, honestly, being underwater is so odd for me, I forget what I'm capable of sometimes,” Arctur answered, sounding somewhat embarrassed.

  “Awesome, so this whole thing will be a much easier clean-up than expected,” Adriana said as the trio began making their way out of the kelp-like forest.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Once outside the underwater forest, the party made some final preparations regarding how they were going to go about removing the snakes. They wanted to be as efficient as possible, considering they still had two to three more spots to deal with.

  The first one up was Arctur. His eyes became orbs of green power, and he set foot on the lake floor. Then he knelt and placed the palms of his hands on the floor as well. Once that was done, his eyes began to glow brighter, and Arctur used another technique.

  “Earth’s Embrace.”

  A ripple spread throughout the ground of the entire kelp forest. Sadly, some of the snakes noticed the warning and shot out of their holes. Still, many did not do so and found the very ground smothering them to death.

  After their friend had finished his technique, not looking worse for wear, it was Alexion’s and Adriana's turn.

  Adriana sent out another of her pulses, finding every Lurking Weed Snake within the forest in front of them as well as the various hole snakes that had survived Arctur’s attack. Then, once she had hold of them, which totaled to twenty or so, she spent even more mana to forcibly float them out of the weed forest. Granted, she spent more mana than usual due to the number of enemies, and the fact that the hole snakes tried to break out with their movement ability. After all, Adriana had to counter their magic by increasing the power of her own.

  Finally, once all the snakes were brought together, it was Alexion’s turn. Her elf reached out with his hand wide open before using a technique, his hand closing as the words came forth.

  “Crushing Depths.”

  Much like Adriana’s favorite attack, Alexion’s technique compressed the water around the group of monsters, no doubt costing him a huge amount of mana, as they were all crushed.

  Dan didn't bother to stick around and watch the overpowered trio after they cleared the first forest of kelp. He had been wondering how they were going to do it, not really doubting that they could, just wanting to see what overpowered way they would kill all the snakes. And he was happy to say that they had not disappointed him.

  At first, Dan had been rather annoyed at the three friends for being so powerful. Not that he still wasn't annoyed, but he was just enjoying the show. After all, it was great to see how different people went about solving the many quests and problems he had made in his dungeon. Plus, who didn’t like overpowered protagonists?

  Of course, it also helped that Dan had many other individuals to watch, even as he worked on other things. The main example currently being the three idiots that he was becoming rather fond of. The three of them were the complete opposites of the overpowered trio.

  Where the trio was a legitimate threat to anything they came across, the three guys were basically liabilities to themselves. They overestimated themselves too much, which led to Dan seeing them almost get killed, and having to send healers more than once in the last two days alone.

  In fact, he was currently watching as they were almost killed, yet again. The three of them had decided that they were incredible adventurers and could take on snakes without issue. So, they had walked into a lake weed forest without shields. Though at the very least, they had used their enhancements. Not that it did much for them, and they ended up getting bitten and slammed into multiple times, barely managing to make it out of the snake-infested forest.

  Still, Dan had to give it to them; they had killed a few of the snakes in their panic, even if they leveled half of the damn lake weed forest while doing so.

  The first to wake up was Urly; he looked around, his balding head and burly build more intimidating than his mind.

  “Guys? How did we get here?” Urly asked, his voice a bit high-pitched and not matching his gruff look.

  “I think the snakes brought us up here,” Larry said after waking and coughing up some water, his usual frizzy hair wet, removing many inches from his height.

  Finally, there was Poe, who woke last and was immediately angry.

  “No, you idiot! It was the dungeon!” Poe yelled while smacking the back of Larry’s head.

  “Well, that’s nice of it. Thank you, dungeon!” Urly added, yelling into the air.

  “Yeah, that makes sense. So, should we head back down? We still have that quest to finish.” Larry stated confidently.

  “No! We almost died, I told you guys we should have used our shields!” Poe yelled angrily, standing up.

  “Well, why did you vote for us not to?” Larry asked, taking Poe by surprise when he suddenly made a good point.

  “Shut up! Don’t talk back to your leader! Now, let's eat and sleep before heading back down. And Urly, for the love of the gods, stop petting the water, the dungeon can’t really hear or feel you!” Poe said, smacking Larry again and yelling at Urly, who was still trying to thank the dungeon.

  After clearing the first weed forest, the party quickly made their way to the next one and also cleared it without issue. However, the third forest they went to was half destroyed, which made them wonder what idiots had done it. Thankfully, there were other forests still available to complete the quest, so they moved on.

  With the final forest cleared, the request was completed, and the party headed back to speak with the head harvester. The harvester gave them some lovely green leather pouches as a reward. And with that, the party said their goodbyes before heading up to the surface. It was getting rather close to sundown, and they wanted to spend some more time up above. They would return once again the following day to continue their questing until something happened with the event. Well, unless they had somehow missed something significant and were currently missing whatever the event was about.