Hit points don’t really translate to real life though, sure some people are tougher than others but health and damage are not very straight forward. You could take a grievous injury and survive and then be felled by a slight cut that gets infected. HP correlates usually to challenge, something with more HP should take longer to kill and allow it more time to kill you. In reality weapons are not designed to chop off points of health, they are usually designed to kill and a warrior will try to make the fight as short as possible in most situations because injuries by weapons tend to be life threatening and not just a minor inconvenience of losing two percent of health.

Even the most basic sword will kill if used properly, weather you are the greatest warrior on earth or just an innocent bystander noncombatant. MMO’s and RPG’s abstract this by adding health but in reality getting hit with a great sword or great axe more than once is probably going to be a very terminal day for that individual.

Anyway, I say all this to reiterate that level is purely a game mechanic and not a lore one other than denoting how “powerful” an individual is to others in some arbitrary number ranking system.