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Toriyama decided to curse everything in his last moments. His words brought me back to my senses. At first, I’d thought that if he’d undone his skill on the Princess Sion, it wouldn’t have come to this.

Even Toriyama should’ve known that he would be killed if he didn’t do that. This just went to show how dire the situation was. Anyone would normally undo the skill in such situations.

Since everyone in the Fraus Kingdom was nice, I thought that even if Toriyama had killed someone as a result of the bullying, they wouldn’t have gone so far as to kill him.

That’s how I would have gone, at least. Which is why I didn’t understand why Toriyama wouldn’t undo his skill.

There was the possibility that if he undid his skill, things might get worse than they already were, but I couldn’t think of anything worse than having death knock on your door.

Even under this circumstance, I was able to remain composed and think rationally. That being said, I believe this stemmed directly from this ludicrous circumstance in which one of my classmates was murdering another.

I started to wonder what exactly Toriyama had arranged in that contract. He’d made it right as we were summoned here.

(Contract… Contract. Now that I think about it, they didn’t stop questioning Toriyama about who he had signed the contract with and whether the princess was involved in it when the bullying towards him began. This implies that the person who stands to benefit the most from this situation is…)

I almost screamed when I finally realized what was going on.

It was too late. I could no longer hear Toriyama’s voice. His eyes had already closed.
Toriyama was dead. The one who’d protected us all this time was dead. I had protected the wrong thing.

◇◇◇

Toriyama’s skill was known as Contract. From what he told me before his death, I assumed it involved setting up a contract and enforcing it. This contract could be verbal, and it wasn’t limited to only a single person.

In the period between us waking up and being escorted to the king, Toriyama had been able to learn about his skill. He had, therefore, chosen the path that would avert the worst scenario.

After all, we’d been brought here to take down that which the kingdom couldn’t handle. Immediately after being summoned, we’d been told that we had the potential to become really strong. The strongest in the kingdom. However, we were not residents of that kingdom.

Therefore, they had to either win us over or force us to be in their debt to get us to fight for them. Moreover, since magic existed in this world, they could also force us to obey.

They must’ve wanted absolute assurance that we wouldn’t betray them. After all, they had no guarantee we wouldn’t. That’s why Toriyama had set up the contract before they could verify his skills.

He made it so that we wouldn’t be bothered at all. And yet we destroyed that with our own hands. If only one of us had been by his side, if only one of us had listened to him, if only one of us had spoken up in his last moments…

Nevertheless, I couldn’t complain because I, too, hadn’t done anything. I was sure that without Toriyama, our lives would start to fall apart. This made me start to consider what I would do moving forward.

◇◇◇

In the end, even after a whole night of thinking, I couldn’t come to a decision. Or, to be more precise, I had come to a decision, but it was already too late for it. I couldn’t think of anything I could do now.

We couldn’t defeat the castle’s knights, so even if we were to escape, it would have to be amid some kind of confusion. However, situations like the one from yesterday were unlikely to happen that often.

The best time to escape was yesterday, right before Ichinari killed Toriyama. Given that Princess Sion was there as well, many of the knights would’ve been focused on it.

However, it was already too late. After what happened with Toriyama, the surveillance got even tighter. It would be foolish to try and fight head-on, and the Fraus side had the geographical advantage, so we couldn’t even take them by surprise.

I figured the royal family wasn’t very good fighters, so if we killed them all, we could do something, but the knights weren’t going to stand by and do nothing. We would just turn into wanted criminals.

This meant that at this point, our only option was to hope that the Fraus Kingdom intended to get along well with us. Both sides would close their eyes to Toriyama, pretend it was nothing more than a sad incident, and shake hands. We needed to make an effort to stay in the Fraus Kingdom’s good books.

Since they would need us when we got stronger, it seemed likely that the kingdom would try to subdue us while we were still weak. They likely wouldn’t kill us unless something major happened.

If we were useful to them, they might just keep us in our existing relationships and let us lead fulfilling lives. However, our being useful to them meant that we would need to fight. This meant fighting monsters, or maybe even fellow humans.

I figured we’d be able to return once we defeated the Demon Lord, but looking back, they hadn’t truly promised that. All things considered, once we defeated the Demon Lord, it seemed unlikely that the kingdom would permit us to return.

In the end, our only choice was to obey the kingdom. I was just a regular high school student not too long ago; I didn’t want to fight. I’d never even killed an animal. I couldn’t imagine killing anything, let alone a person.

As I was thinking about all of this, training time arrived.