“Ihihihi! It’s finally time! I’ve been waiting for this moment! Ihihi—”
Add suddenly stopped laughing.
I also noticed something odd.
It was above my head. Since I was upside down, that was to say, it was below me, at the
bottom of the Pit of Oblivion.
“Wait, what’s that...”
It was the first time I heard fear in Add’s voice.
After a few seconds, my mentor looked toward it as well.
“What if...”
My mentor’s voice had turned raspy.
“What if the Pit of Oblivion doesn’t lead to the Ancient Heart...?”
“Sir...?”
It was the most desperate expression that had appeared on my mentor’s face since we
entered Spirit Tomb Albion.
We couldn’t see anything yet. The feeling alone was enough to send us into despair. I
had never felt this powerless before, not even when I faced Faker, who was a mage from
the Age of the Gods.
“What if this hole leads to the Fairy Realm, or somewhere close to it...? What if the place
that it leads to is more dangerous than the Age of the Gods...?”
Soon, we were able to catch a glimpse of it in the darkness.
There was light at the bottom of the hole.
To be more precise, there were six glowing eyes. That meant that there were three giant
beasts waiting to devour us whole.
“Huh...?”
Strange. We should have been getting closer and closer, but the monsters didn’t get any
larger.
“Is it because...they’re too big...?”
If that was the case, each of the eyeballs would be tens of meters wide. There was a
contradiction between the size of the beasts and the size of the Pit of Oblivion. Our
senses struggled to process this contradiction as we continued to approach them.
“Is it... Cerberus...!?” My mentor exclaimed. “No, it can’t be. Is it a monster of the same
origin..? Depending on the situation, it might be...”
I felt my throat dry up as my mentor continued frantically guessing in a broken voice.
It was as if my soul would dissipate if those eyes turned to look at me. That creature was
more than just a Phantasmal Beast. It wasn’t some creature that had evolved into a
monster because of the strange qualities of Albion. The authority it had over its domain
could not even be compared to modern magecraft.
...I remember dealing with something that made me feel a similar way— the thing that
had been in Touko Aozaki’s briefcase, or perhaps her body.
They were definitely different, but they both felt alien. The being sitting at the bottom of
the pit was not something that a human could comprehend.
In a sense, that beast was the ruler of Albion.

The Case Files of Lord El-Melloi II, Volume 10, Chapter 2