Maximo did not begin with power; he began with Geometry. At Level 1, he was merely a starving shadow in the city of Atheria, defined by a single, terrifying principle: to eliminate all variables. He knew that if a skill was learned, it must be learned perfectly, thus making its outcome certain. If he could not achieve perfect certainty in every aspect of the mortal world, he was utterly vulnerable. His journey to Level 10 was a decade-long, self-imposed psychological and physical crucifixion.
Phase I: The Physical Calculus (Levels 2-5)
Focus: Maximizing Dexterity, Strength, and Constitution. The body becomes a machine of absolute precision.
The Grind of Movement (DEX 100)
Maximo understood that to be an assassin, he must first defeat space and sound.
Perfect Stealth: His training required the eradication of sound. He utilized a custom chamber where the floor was a lattice of tensioned, whisper-sensitive silk, covered by a layer of fine, resonant marble dust. He spent years mastering movement over this floor until the marble dust remained completely undisturbed, and his footfall produced zero acoustic signature. This was not merely walking softly; it was the conceptual nullification of audible impact, allowing him to be conceptually invisible even when in plain sight.
Acrobatics and Evasion: He trained in a perpetual, simulated storm of razor-sharp iron filings, using only kinetic intuition to weave between the particles. This elevated Acrobatics beyond balance; it became the predictive calculus of trajectory. This training extended to his Acrobatics (Zero-G), where he used gyroscopic rigs and compressed air jets to master instantaneous stabilization in chaotic, non-standard gravity fields, ensuring that even falling was a controlled, predictable event.
Sleight of Hand & Locksmithing: His hands became extensions of his will. Sleight of Hand was perfected by attempting to swap objects—a king's signet ring for a common pebble—in the exact millisecond a human eye completes a blink cycle, exploiting a biological flaw in visual processing. Locksmithing transcended feel; using advanced metallurgy (a skill he quickly mastered), he could mentally visualize the interior of a tumblers mechanism, and his custom-fabricated tools could move those tumblers with micro-newton precision, bypassing all known locking mechanisms in the mortal sphere.
The Engine of Endurance (STR/CON 100)
To maximize strength was to maximize functional durability and resilience.
Athletics and Resilience: Maximo deliberately subjected his body to Extreme Environments—weeks spent in volcanic sulfur pits and frozen oceanic trenches—to test and rebuild his immune and muscular systems. He developed Absolute Biological Stasis (in its initial, temporary form) by forcing his body to halt its own decay response under duress. Breath Holding became a form of suspended animation, allowing him to endure chemical attacks and suffocation far beyond human limits.
Final Strike Synthesis: This was not about brute force, but about controlled, surgical application. He trained to read the subtle muscle contractions in a target's wrist or neck. He would hold his strike until the exact microsecond the target's defensive muscle reflexively contracted, and then hit the adjacent, vulnerable point with 100% force, guaranteeing a total, surgical incapacitation.
Phase II: The Mental Forge (Levels 6-8)
Focus: Maximizing Intelligence and Wisdom. The mind becomes a predictive weapon system.
Intellect as Infrastructure (INT 100)
Maximo's mind transformed into a computational engine, viewing the universe as a vast, solvable puzzle.
Cryptography and Linguistics: He realized that reality was encoded. He devoured every language, dialect, and cipher known, turning Linguistics into a tool for cultural predictability. Cryptography extended beyond codes; it became the language of systemic failure, allowing him to forecast market collapses and political upheavals based on subtle anomalies in trade records or diplomatic patterns (a combination of Economics and Bureaucracy).
Poisons and Cartography: His mastery of Toxicity/Poisons was not about death, but about precision. He mastered dosages that induced perfect amnesia, temporary moral panic, or controlled biological paralysis, often requiring years of sourcing and synthesis using advanced Geology/Metallurgy knowledge. His Cartography was not about drawing maps, but about mapping the three-dimensional flux of space-time within a localized area, a prerequisite for his later teleportation mastery.
The Conceptual Library: He began the painstaking process of cataloging every piece of knowledge he acquired. This was the birth of his internal Archive of Immutability, a mnemonic technique so flawless it could instantly retrieve any of his skills, granting him the nascent ability of Perfect Target Synthesis—the ability to know exactly which skill was required for any situation.
Intuition as Foresight (WIS 100)
Where Intelligence solved the known, Wisdom anticipated the unknown.
Perception and Insight: His Perception became hyper-acute. He trained to see the micro-tremors in a target's hand, the dilation of their pupils, and the subtle shifts in their breathing pattern, allowing him to read their Intent and anticipate their moves several seconds before they occurred. Survival (Urban/Wild) became a matter of pure statistical certainty, always placing him in the optimal position for resources and escape.
Interrogation and Navigation: He mastered Interrogation by reading micro-expressions and correlating them with known linguistic and historical patterns, ensuring a subject could not hide the truth from him. His Navigation (Instinctual) allowed him to map the world using subtle changes in the magnetic field and atmospheric pressure, ensuring he was never truly lost.
Phase III: The Social Cipher (Levels 9-10)
Focus: Maximizing Charisma. People become controllable constants.
Persona Weaving (CHA 100): Maximo mastered people by mastering their archetypes. He created and maintained hundreds of flawless, consistent personas. This was achieved by analyzing every social class, every regional dialect, and every historical figure, perfectly replicating their speech patterns, gait, and emotional weight. His goal was not mimicry, but Conceptual Consistency—to embody an identity that felt utterly real to the observer.
The Controlled Reaction: His Deception and Intimidation were not acts of emotion, but controlled releases of specific pheromones and precisely calculated body language designed to manipulate the target's fight-or-flight response. He could trigger loyalty, fear, or overwhelming trust with a controlled glance and a specific tonal modulation, making his Misdirection total.
The Climax: The Ironwood Contract (Level 10)
Maximo was flawless. He had achieved the apex of human potential. He undertook the Ironwood Contract—the assassination of the corrupt Baron Von Gracht—to prove his self-imposed mastery was complete.
The Execution:
Maximo executed the plan with silent, invisible grace. He slipped past two layers of human guards (Perfect Stealth), disabled three complex mechanical locks (Locksmithing), replaced a vault full of crucial documents with flawless forgeries (Forgery), and used a temporary chemical paralysis to neutralize the Baron (Toxicity/Poisons). He was the perfect, unassailable assassin.
The Catastrophic Failure:
As he made his silent egress through a hidden cellar, he brushed against a single, minor obstacle: a low-tier Arcane Glyph spell—a simple magical ward placed by a novice wizard to guard against common thieves.
The resulting backlash of raw, unfiltered magical energy—a force defined by concept rather than physics—did not kill him, but it instantly vaporized his meticulously crafted, peerless thief's tools, burned the specialized nerve-dampening gloves off his hands, and nearly cooked the synapses in his brain.
Maximo escaped, but the trauma was profound. He looked at his scarred hands—the hands of a god of the mundane—and understood the devastating truth: Physical perfection is fragile. He had defeated the world's best guards and spies, but was stopped by a cheap magical lock because his power was bound by the rules of the physical world.
This failure was the catalyst. He realized that to be truly untouchable, he must master not the mortal skills, but the very Conceptual Code that governed the reality of magic, time, and existence itself. His journey to Level 11 would not be another step in the mundane, but a leap into the Void.