Magnus Chane and the Conquest Protocol

Magnus was about to close his menu when he remembered something and opened his Inventory instead.

Inside it, next to the stacks of potions he got from daily quests that tasted oddly like Coca-Cola for some reason, was a crate. It was his reward for completing Jordan’s monthly quest — the Epic Crate according to the System’s wording. He hadn’t bothered looking at or touching it since he’d gotten it. At first, because he wasn’t in the mood for something like that, given how he was feeling and what he and Alex were going through at the time. And then he’d kind of just forgotten about it completely.

Until now.

He focused on selecting it, and was greeted with an item description:

He read it twice. Then went very still.

“Magnus?” Alex called to him, noticing he was frozen in place. “What’s wrong?”

“Remember that miracle item that revived me after…”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence; everyone’s attention was already on him. He swallowed. “I… uh, I just found another way of obtaining those with a way higher chance than the daily quests.”

“The extra lives item?” Ethan asked.

Magnus nodded, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Monthly quests,” he said. “The one with Jordan last month, when I finished it…” He looked at Alex. “…When we—” A vague gesture between them. “—you know, I got an item. The System calls it an Epic Crate. I never looked at it before because… well, because there was a lot going on and then I just forgot about it.”

“Babe, you can just say ‘sex.’ We’re all adults here,” Alex said with exasperated fondness.

“Yeah, Mags,” Maya teased. “You’ve slept with four people in this room already, and will sleep with a fifth one by the end of the week.”

He cleared his throat, blushing furiously. “Anyway, the crate has five items, with a random drop chance for each roll. And Substitute Dolls has a ten-percent drop rate. Its drop rate in daily quests is only a point-five-percent chance.”

The room immediately went quiet.

“…That's a twenty-times higher drop rate,” Jade said after a moment.

“Apparently.”

“Well?” Sofia prompted. “What are you waiting for? Open it!”

“That’s the thing,” he replied, “I can’t.”

“Come again?” Alex’s head snapped toward him.

“The crate’s locked,” he said. “I need to be level nine to open it. I’m only eight.” He rubbed a hand down his face. “Sounds like the story of my life at this point. Finally, this thing gives me a massively better shot at getting an item I actually needed for a change than I’ve had this whole time. And I’m one level short.”

Silence settled over the room for a moment, the kind that came with people quietly doing the same math Magnus had just done and arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion.

“Ouch. And you just leveled up this morning too,” Ethan pointed out. “Rough timing.”

“Well,” Jade said, folding her arms, “now you have a very concrete reason to level up faster.”

“Survival,” Sofia said quietly.

“Yeah,” Magnus said. “That tracks.”

He tried, out of curiosity, to pull the crate out of his Inventory the way he sometimes did with smaller items — a mental tug, expecting it to appear in his hand the way the potions did. Nothing happened. The crate stayed exactly where it was in the menu, locked and unmovable.

“Can’t take it out either,” he said. “It must be a different category from the potion consumables.”

“Potion consumables?” Aaron prompted, seizing on the phrase immediately.

“Yeah.” Magnus reached out with one hand, focused briefly, and a bottle of liquid materialized in his grip — his hand was empty one second, and holding it the next.

The room stared.

“Okay, I didn’t know you could make things appear out of thin air,” Sofia said.

Magnus turned the bottle over. “These give temporary stat boosts. An additional three stat points to one of my stats depending on the type of potion for an hour.” He uncapped it and took a sip, more out of habit than curiosity at this point. “It tastes like Coca-Cola for some reason. Always has. Don’t know why.”

Ethan tilted his head. “Do they all taste like Coca-Cola? Or does each one taste different?”

Everyone looked at him.

“What?” Ethan shrugged. “It’s a valid scientific concern.”

Aaron opened his mouth to dismiss it, then visibly reconsidered. “That is… actually testable data.”

“Thank you!”

“I didn’t say it was a good use of our time. I said it was testable.”

“I mean, do we actually have anything better to do?”

***

As it turned out, they indeed did not have anything better to do. So, what followed was fifteen minutes of Magnus pulling potions out of thin air while Aaron sorted them by their listed stat boost onto five separate sheets of paper, courtesy of Katie, each labeled by hand: STA, STR, AGI, INT, SPD.

They tested three of each. Because, despite saying this was a waste of their time, Aaron still took experimental design very seriously.

The Stamina potions tasted like Coca-Cola, consistent with what Magnus had already noticed.

The Strength potions tasted like Fanta Orange, which surprised absolutely no one after the first sip, yet somehow still generated an argument between Ethan and Aaron about whether that made any thematic sense.

The Agility potions tasted like Red Bull, which Sofia declared “annoyingly on the nose.”

The Intelligence potions tasted like Sprite, light and slightly too sweet.

The Speed potions tasted like Monster energy drink, which made Chloe cough after her sip and declare she wasn’t doing that again regardless of scientific value.

By the end of it, the coffee table was littered with empty bottles sorted into five distinct groups.

Ethan looked at the array, then at Magnus, with the expression of someone who had just had a genuine revelation.

“Bro,” he said. “You’ve been a walking vending machine this whole time.”

Magnus put his face in his hands.

“That’s actually a pretty accurate summary,” Aaron admitted.

“I hate that it is,” Magnus said, muffled.

***

They made dinner together, which had become its own kind of ritual by now — Miguel taking point without being asked, people drifting in and out of the kitchen depending on who needed a break from whatever conversation was happening in the living room, Tony perched somewhere overseeing the process with strong opinions he expressed to nobody who could act on them except Magnus, who ignored most of it at this point out of self-preservation, and Alex, who chose to selectively laugh or glare at the raccoon.

They ate outside, dragging chairs and a couple of blankets out onto the sand as the light went gold and then soft blue. Someone had turned on string lights from somewhere. Nobody remembered whose idea that had been, which meant it was probably either Maya’s or Sofia’s, since most unexplained decisions around the beach house could be traced back to Maya just as most unexplained infrastructure improvements could be to Sofia.

“So, we didn’t do anything today,” Valeria observed, halfway through her plate. “Like, actually anything. We didn’t go to the beach. We didn’t go into town. We sat in the living room arguing about a supernatural booty quest System.”

“I mean, I actually think it was a productive day, all things considered,” Ethan said. “We conducted many important scientific experiments today.”

“We watched Magnus learn a language by kissing Jade. Did weird and random things all day. And then taste-tested fifteen bottles of magical soft drinks he pulled from thin air.”

“Exactly! It was for more than science,” Ethan exclaimed. “It was for the greater good!”

“Not sure about the greater good,” Aaron mused, “but I did take four pages’ worth of notes.”

Jordan would have hated every second of this, Magnus thought, watching the conversation drift lazily around the fire pit someone had gotten going. Or… no, that wasn’t quite right. Jordan probably would have sat exactly where Aaron was sitting, quietly amused, occasionally throwing in a dry correction, secretly enjoying every second of it while insisting otherwise. Then again, if Jordan were here today, they wouldn’t have been able to bring up the System at all.

He caught himself smiling at nothing in particular.

“What?” Alex asked, nudging his shoulder with hers.

“Nothing. Just thinking that today was, objectively, a very strange way to spend a vacation.”

“Objectively,” Alex agreed, “yes.”

“But?”

“But I had a good time,” she said simply. “I don’t know. It was fun—spending time with all of them. And… normal. Well, in the specific way our life is normal now, but still. Normal.”

Around them, the conversation had loosened further: Nicole recounting a story about her father’s law firm, Rachel and Aaron quietly comparing notes on something from their pre-med coursework, Maya trying — and failing — to win back Chloe’s favor for her blunder that morning. Jade was explaining to Katie, patiently and with visible amusement, the specific Vietnamese phrase Magnus had used that morning that was grammatically perfect but apparently not something an actual native speaker would ever say out loud — even giving similar examples in English.

Nobody seemed to mind that the entire day had gone toward an elaborate, occasionally undignified investigation into a supernatural quest system. Not even Valeria, despite her earlier protests. If anything, the mood was better than it had been in days — looser, easier, the kind of mood that longtime friends settled into after a long day of doing nothing in particular together.

Magnus looked around at all of it — Tony digging in the sand for whatever reason, Miguel handing Carmen the last of the good pieces without being asked, Katie writing something with the small private smile of someone who’d found good material, Jade laughing at something Sofia said, really laughing, more than he’d seen her do all week — and thought that despite all the ups and downs, this Spring Break was turning out to be something he genuinely enjoyed and wouldn’t change one bit.

And somehow, after a full day of one experiment after another, Magnus’s exp bar was already sitting at forty percent to level nine.