~ A long time ago, I had the hubris necessary to believe I could novelize the entirety of the Nasuverse. (I didn't get very far.) ~
I've decided to post the sort of retelling of Angel Notes I wrote here, as well as on Ao3, so that at least someone will have seen it.
Here is the Table of Contents for what would have been Part 1: Notes on Angels

Table of Contents
1.1: The Great Gun God Falls



The Great Gun God Falls
The air burns where it touches my skin. I should be wearing more protective equipment, but for now I have abandoned my armor so that only the gasmask remains. They will heal my injuries later, when I am done.

I don’t know how the jet is still in the air. Half of the fuselage has been burned away by the Great Cross’s light. I suppose the AI that treats the jet like its body is just as determined to survive as the rest of us.

I crouch, frozen, in the gap in the hull. The Great Cross looms huge and alien in front of me, its terrible light passing through the atmosphere to the ground like the air is nothing. Everything it touches disappears. I just have to make sure it does not touch me.

The gun in my hand is as heavy as the world. It is a strange weapon. Only an original human can wield it, meaning it is a weapon suitable only for the weak, and yet it has the power to bring down gods.

I lose track of how long I am crouched in that space between the jet and the sky. I think my body has frozen, that I am a statue, that my mind is the only living thing left for miles and miles. There is no separation between me and my weapon. The purpose for which I have lived every moment between my birth and the present is to hold my weapon and wait for an opportunity.

I know that opportunity has come before. I remember the falling angel, the different angel, the one that now haunts my living room and badly plays my dead sister’s guitar.

“I hope that the Cross won’t come and visit me too. Especially if it’s a cute girl. I have enough cute girls in my life already.”

I learned from the dead angel in my house that these monsters mankind call Aristoteles are actually the embodiment of the planets. Because Gaia herself has turned against us, the ultimate manifestations of life on the other planets have decided to pay us a visit, lured by our mother’s pangs, intent on wiping us from the dead Earth because we—or more properly they, since I am not of the species that persists on the Earth’s surface, but one of their ancestors—refuse to die.

I am confident that I will be able to shoot the Cross and watch it fall. The Black Barrel is a god-killing gun, good only for the ending of lives different from my own.

My thoughts burn themselves through, leaving only the gun in my hand and the knowledge that it is able to do what I have been tasked to do. It is not certainty that keeps me steady as the grain in the atmosphere burns my too-human flesh. It is knowledge as certain as the red sky that keeps me focused. I can do this. I have done this before.

Still, time is still and I am also still and perhaps even the world is still. We are all waiting for the Cross to move into position.

I do not know when I accepted that I would die. I think it is when I made the wounded angel woman, Izanagi, flee, and told her I would see her again. We both knew it was a lie, and knowing it was a lie is what made me accept that I would be bringing about more than one ending today.

I wonder if any of them will miss me. I am isolated because I have spent my time on what I have learned is the vast corpse of a dead alien hunting falling leaves shaped like feral angels, and this is not a job that makes me friends.

The beast man, whose name I still do not know but who smiles wide with all his teeth whenever we hunt together, may miss me. Or perhaps he is dead. The Great Cross has destroyed this strange little oasis of green in the Land of Steel, and the people who were once able to make their lives there will have been displaced.

It is this destruction that proves also that the Ultimate Ones do not care about each other. The great, mushroom like structure that the delegate from Saturn so carelessly destroys is the corpse of his compatriot from Venus. They are not comrades. They all simply have the same job and will consume each other if brought too close together.

The Ultimate One from Venus, the dead angel in my house, might have been able to stand against the Great Cross, but by the time she had the capacity to want humanity to survive, she was already dead, her power greatly diminished. It was only her parasitic relationship with the ideas of the humans who built their homes on top of her that gave her this sort of second life and allowed her to meet me.

I am brought back into my body by two things. First, my medical apparatus that keeps me alive in an atmosphere that would otherwise burn my lungs and rot my eyes is beeping. It is running out of power. If I do not land soon, it will fail, and the hostile air will do what the earth could not. Second, this is my chance. The center of the Great Cross is in my sites, and if I shoot right this instant, I will if not destroy it then at least drive it away.

That is all that is required of me. Drive the Great Cross away, so that the humans living below might reclaim their lives and their homes that are yet to be destroyed.

I have a choice. I can tell the struggling AI to pilot the ship back down. This would not be cowardice. I would be alive, and survival is what matters above all in a world where the very Earth has turned against us. I would not be blamed. Nobody can stand against the Aristoteles and win. They are monsters beyond comprehension. They have already taken the Western Continent for good. A little more land is meaningless, as long as a viable population of humans and a-rays survive.

I can also take my shot, and then I will die, because the act of pulling the trigger will eat up time I do not have left.

It is barely a decision. I have seconds to think about it, and I make it in seconds. I squeeze the trigger on the Black Barrel and feel the bullet passing through it, the shock running up my hand and into my shoulder. The bullet is too fast and too small for me to watch, but I know it hits true. The center of the cross, where the two perpendicular lines of the great fortress meet, buckles like hot metal, and I have the strange experience of hearing a god scream.

I topple forward out of the hole in the jet. If there is anyone screaming in my communicator, I do not hear them. I only hear the rush of air around me as I fall.

My lungs have begun to burn. The grain will tear at the soft flesh of my insides, and by the time I hit the ground, I will be scoured inside and out by the magical pollutants the new mankind can breathe like air.

I see a winged figure burning up beside me as I fall. Is it another angel? Is it the body of the Ultimate One, a final scream from something that only now understands that it too may die? I do not know.

All I can think, as I fall towards the ground that I know will kill me, is

How
beautiful.

My will to survive flickers and dies, like a candle just blown out.

I am simply organic matter, a mass upon the gray soil.