It Really Is Something Certain In Life, I Tell You

I didn't know what the formula was that calculates the reward received from completing a Contract, whether it was solely to do with retrieving our portion of the stolen World Stability from the Protagonist or if it even took the listed Difficulty into account at all, but the reward this time was definitely more than I had expected.

3-star Difficulty, even if the Drakon-Rasa Contract itself didn't pose much of a risk to my life, was an entirely different beast compared to 1-star.

The differences can clearly be identified even if you place the Protagonists of each Difficulty side-by-side.

For 1-star Difficulty, all of the Protagonists were weak in terms of combat strength for one―or at the very least weak enough for me to kill them by myself with Poor Physical Ability―and two, they were very vulnerable in terms of defensive capabilities.

Weak and vulnerable.