The panel waited with the patience of something that did not experience impatience.
Maxwell sat on the edge of his bed and studied it the way he studied most unfamiliar things: thoroughly, without touching anything he didn't yet understand. The interface had expanded when he tapped it, unfolding outward like a document being laid flat, and what it revealed was organized with the clean, unsentimental logic of a form that expected to be read rather than admired.
His name was at the top. His level was beneath it.
────────────────────────────────────────
JOHN WICK SYSTEM — USER PROFILE
Name : Maxwell Connor
Level : 1
Title : Civilian (Unranked)
─ PHYSICAL STATS ────────────────────────
STR [Strength] : 8 / 100
AGI [Agility] : 9 / 100
END [Endurance] : 7 / 100
PRE [Precision] : 11 / 100
CON [Constitution] : 8 / 100
Overall Physical Rating: POOR
Nutritional Status : MALNOURISHED
─ ACTIVE SKILLS ────────────────────────
None unlocked.
─ LEVEL 2 REQUIREMENTS ──────────────────
Raise all physical stats to 20+
Method: physical training only.
Shortcuts: none available.
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell read through the stats twice.
Eight. His strength was an eight out of a hundred. His endurance was a seven. The system had assessed five years of Gotham survival — five years of staying alert, staying careful, moving through one of the most dangerous cities in the DC universe without dying — and had rendered its verdict in a single word: poor. It had then added malnourished, which was less a verdict than an accusation.
He closed the panel with a gesture that felt intuitive, as though the interface had been designed for hands it had already accounted for, and sat back and thought about it.
The God of Entertainment had given him a system built around becoming John Wick. The stats told the story clearly enough: he was not John Wick. He was a twenty-three-year-old who had been eating cheaply and moving carefully and exercising exactly as much as Gotham survival required, which was apparently not much. The system wanted all five stats above twenty before it would advance him. It had specified, with what Maxwell suspected was pointed emphasis, that shortcuts were not available.
He was going to have to earn it.
He sat with this for a moment, turning it over. Part of him — the part that had spent five years carefully not becoming conspicuous — wanted to close the panel and go back to moving parcels and pretending none of this was happening. That part of him had kept him alive. He had genuine respect for it.
But another part of him, the part that had worn a badge once and understood the particular weight of having a purpose, was looking at the system display and doing something it hadn't done in a long time.
Calculating.
The God of Entertainment wanted a show. Maxwell wanted to go home. The path to going home — to finding something with the authority to override a cosmic entity's arrangements — ran through the DC universe's power ladder, and the bottom rung of that ladder required him to be considerably more capable than a malnourished civilian with an eight in strength.
He would play along. For now. On his terms, at his pace, toward his objective.
And when he found his opening, the God of Entertainment was going to discover that entertaining and controllable were not the same thing.
Maxwell Connor stood up, rolled his neck until it cracked, and went to look for a gym.
— ✦ —
The gym he found was three blocks east, above a laundromat, and it smelled like effort and old rubber and the specific industrial cleaning product that every boxing gym in every city seemed to purchase from the same supplier. It was run by a man named Torrance who had the build of someone who had once been very serious about fighting and had since become very serious about teaching other people to be serious about fighting. He charged a monthly rate that Maxwell could afford if he cut his food budget, which the system had already indicated needed addressing anyway.
He started the next morning.
The first week was humbling in the way that honest assessments always are. His cardio was poor. His upper body strength was functional for daily life and completely inadequate for anything beyond it. His form on basic movements — the squat, the deadlift, the pull-up — was the form of someone who understood the theory and had not yet reconciled it with the reality of his own body. He pushed through each session with the patient, gritted determination of a man who had decided that discomfort was information rather than a reason to stop, and went home afterward and ate more than he had been eating, because malnourished was a problem with a straightforward solution if you were willing to spend the money.
He was willing to spend the money.
The second week was better. His body, it turned out, had been waiting for this — had been accumulating the potential energy of five years of underuse and was now converting it with an efficiency that surprised him. The system tracked it in real time: numbers ticking upward in the corner of the panel he had learned to keep minimized during the day, small incremental gains that accumulated into something visible by the end of the second week. STR: 11. AGI: 12. END: 10.
He added police training in the third week.
Not the formal curriculum — he had no access to a range, no partner for scenario drills, no supervisor to sign off on qualifications that didn't exist in this universe. What he had was memory: seven years of professional training encoded in a body that was no longer his original one but that seemed to receive the information anyway, muscle memory rebuilding itself through repetition the way it always did, slow and then suddenly not slow. He ran the fitness standards he had once been tested on. He practiced the restraint and control techniques he had drilled until they were reflex. He did it alone, in the storage room of a building whose owner owed him a favor, at hours when the building was empty.
The system watched and measured and did not comment, which Maxwell appreciated.
By the fifth week, Torrance told him he had good fundamentals and asked if he'd trained before. Maxwell said he'd done some work years ago, which was true in a way that Torrance would not have been able to parse. Torrance nodded and moved on, and Maxwell filed the interaction as a data point: he was becoming visible in small ways. Not dangerous ways. But he would need to manage it.
He ate. He slept. He trained. He ran the panel every evening, watching the numbers climb with the steady satisfaction of someone building toward something real.
He thought about Danny Reeves sometimes, in the early mornings when the gym was empty and the city was quiet. He thought about the train. He thought about what kind of leverage it took to arrange a thing like that and what kind of person would arrange it, and he filed those thoughts carefully in the part of his mind reserved for problems he wasn't ready to solve yet.
He had a sequence. He would follow the sequence.
— ✦ —
The notification arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, six weeks after he'd started, while he was cooling down after a run along the East End waterfront.
He heard the chime before he felt anything — that clean, single tone that he had come to associate with the system having something to say — and then the panel expanded in his vision with a new quality to its display, a brightness that was different from its usual functional readout. Maxwell stopped walking. He stood at the waterfront railing with the grey Gotham harbour spreading out before him and read what the system had to say.
────────────────────────────────────────
★ LEVEL UP ★
Level 1 → Level 2
Title : Operative (Unranked)
─ UPDATED STATS ───────────────────────
STR : 21 AGI : 22
END : 20 PRE : 24
CON : 21
Overall Physical Rating: AVERAGE (Rising)
─ REWARDS UNLOCKED ───────────────────
[SKILL] Basic Martial Arts Set
> Foundational striking, clinch work,
basic takedowns. Passive integration.
[SKILL] Basic Weapon Handling
> Firearms safety, draw and aim,
standard maintenance protocols.
[INTEL] Basic Connections Package
> Low-tier network activated.
3 contacts flagged in your district.
Details in CONTACTS tab.
─ LEVEL 3 MISSIONS ────────────────────
[MAIN] Complete 4 assassination contracts
[MAIN] Attract the interest of a Gotham
major crime organization
Note: contracts available via CONTACTS tab.
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell read through it twice, standing at the waterfront railing with the wind off the harbour moving through his hair.
The skills arrived as the system had apparently always intended them to: not as a download, not as a sudden flood of foreign knowledge, but as a settling. A quiet reorganization of what he already knew into something more complete. The martial arts training he'd been doing for six weeks clarified — the gaps filled in, the form corrected at a level below conscious thought, the foundational principles of striking and clinch work becoming as natural as the police restraint techniques he'd been rebuilding from memory. The firearms handling did something similar: the procedural knowledge he'd carried from his Earth career sharpened and expanded, the feel of a weapon's weight and geometry becoming something his hands understood rather than merely remembered.
He flexed his right hand slowly. Then his left. He rolled his shoulders.
Different. Not dramatically — he was not suddenly a different person, was not flooded with the sudden omnipotence of a man who had watched too many power fantasy narratives and expected transformation to feel like lightning. It was quieter than that, and more real. He felt capable in a way he hadn't felt in five years. Not invincible. Capable. There was a substantial difference, and he was old enough to know it.
He navigated to the CONTACTS tab.
Three names. Brief dossiers, each one tagged with a threat assessment and a utility rating. People in his district who the system had apparently decided were worth knowing. He read through them carefully, committing the details to memory the way he had once committed witness statements, and closed the tab.
Assassination contracts. Four of them, before the system would consider him worth advancing again. Maxwell stood at the railing and looked out at the harbour and thought about that word — assassination — and what it meant in Gotham's specific ecosystem, and whether the people on the other end of those contracts were the kind of people whose removal would make the East End safer or more dangerous, and whether that distinction mattered to the system.
It mattered to him. He would need to know more before he moved.
He was still thinking about it when the second notification appeared. This one was framed differently — the border a deep red rather than the system's usual blue, the text below it in a color that suggested the author had strong feelings about legibility.
────────────────────────────────────────
✉ MESSAGE RECEIVED
Entertain me.
Do that, and I might just be willing
to send you home.
With love,
Your Beloved God of Entertainment ♥
P.S. The workout montage was adequate.
I expected more suffering.
────────────────────────────────────────
Maxwell stared at the message for a long time.
The postscript, specifically. He read it three times. He thought about the implications of a cosmic entity having watched his training sessions and found them insufficiently dramatic. He thought about the phrase 'workout montage,' and what it said about the God of Entertainment's frame of reference, and whether this information was useful or simply maddening.
He decided it was both, in roughly equal measure.
He closed the panel. He turned away from the harbour and began walking back toward the East End, his hands in his pockets, his mind already moving through the problem of four contracts and what they would cost and what they would open.
The God of Entertainment wanted suffering and spectacle. Maxwell wanted leverage and a path home.
For now, those objectives pointed in the same direction.
He would take what the alignment offered and deal with the divergence when it came.