Age of Angels

The Age of Angels is the lost epoch that stands behind the book’s wars, technologies, religions, and apocalyptic crises. It is remembered not as a merely ancient past but as the source of the world’s most dangerous inheritances: the angelic defenders of Heaven, the Infinity Machine, the corruption that followed its misuse, and the historical guilt carried by Michael and Eve. When Jack enters Sahaqiel’s memory and later receives Eve’s testimony, the age becomes the hidden history through which the present can finally be understood.

Civilization and Historical Presence

The age is associated with the Angels and with Heaven, a city whose scale and defenses survive only in fragments. Sahaqiel’s memory takes Jack to the last occasion on which she saw Azrael, the archangel who led the angels of death against Adam. The setting is not an abstract battlefield: ancient defenders rise from the shadows in clinking armor to protect their home, suggesting that the age’s military institutions and loyalties remain embedded in its ruins. Their return turns the past into an active force, until Lilith’s banshee-like cry and Gehenna unravel their withered forms.

The remnants of this civilization also survive through systems rather than monuments. Jack’s awakening displays the Angel System’s status interface, eventually identifying him as a Nephilim and recording enhanced regeneration and mana synthesis. Later, when the Angel System is summoned again, it opens before the gathered survivors with Jack’s interface marked Administrator. The lost age therefore persists as a functioning architecture of power: its language is expressed through levels, titles, skills, and permissions, and its return can alter the balance of the post-catastrophe world.

The Infinity Machine and the End of the Age

Eve’s recorded testimony provides the clearest account of the age’s decisive technological disaster. She created the Infinity Machine to resuscitate those who had fallen in the great war, cataloging and guiding lost souls back to the living world. Its original purpose was restorative, aimed at returning victims of both petty wars and grand schemes to their loved ones.

Michael transformed that purpose. According to Eve, the machine became a weapon used to decide who was worthy of return. It preserved those loyal to Michael while condemning others to be recycled. The machine thus converted death and remembrance into an instrument of political selection. Its apparent promise of universal restoration concealed a system of judgment, exclusion, and control.

Adam’s emergence exposed the incompleteness and instability of the experiment. Eve describes Adam as her beloved and the strongest among them, but the being summoned from oblivion was not the Adam she had known. The machine’s failure, joined to the grief and isolation surrounding its activation, called forth something distorted from the world beyond death. The resulting disaster helped turn the age’s highest achievement into a source of annihilation.

Heaven’s Destruction and Collective Guilt

The destruction of the Age of Angels is visualized through Heaven on fire. Angels rally around Raphael and the other archangels while explosions consume the city, reducing the center of angelic civilization to an image of war and collapse. Eve’s account rejects the idea that the catastrophe can be assigned to a single villain: Michael and Eve are both complicit, though their motives differ. Eve attributes her own part to love, while Michael is associated with the pursuit of power.

Their personal and political failures had planetary consequences. Thousands were urged to die for them, billions were sacrificed in attempts to repair their mistakes, and humanity was nearly extinguished by their hubris. The Age of Angels therefore functions as a warning about power that presents itself as salvation. Its ruins are evidence of a civilization capable of extraordinary creation but unable to prevent devotion, grief, authority, and technological ambition from becoming mutually destructive.

Legacy in the Post-Shutdown World

The age does not end cleanly when its civilization falls. Its systems continue to shape later events, while the Infinity Machine’s shutdown renders modern technologies dependent on mana inoperable. Airships, mechs, and power generators cease functioning, and the world must manage the sudden appearance of hundreds of thousands of resurrected people. They emerge in random and disruptive locations, including bathrooms, ship engine compartments, water wells, and old military installations. The resurrection therefore turns the ancient past into an immediate administrative and social crisis.

The aftermath forces surviving governments to negotiate a new order. Selfia’s Republic and Ada’s Frontier, led by Lita von Strongarm with Kenichi and the other tribal chiefs as a council, manage to quell much of the violence despite their different political systems. The age’s legacy is consequently double-edged: its technologies produce chaos when restored or disabled, but its buried history also becomes the basis for rebuilding and for deciding who belongs in the world that follows.

Narrative Significance

The Age of Angels gives the story a deep historical recurrence. Modern figures repeat its patterns when they kill in the name of humanity’s survival, treat people as expendable, or convert extraordinary power into an instrument of political control. Selfia’s purge of three hundred and sixty-nine lives, including political opponents and dissidents, echoes the age’s habit of sacrificing lives for a promised future. Jack’s horror at the deaths and his refusal to accept the claim that murder was necessary provide a moral counterpoint to that inherited logic.

At the same time, Jack’s actions repeatedly test whether ancient power can be used differently. He calls for surrender before the assault on Roland forces, requests a unit to receive and house prisoners, and later executes Dorian Jazz only after Jazz asks that his men be spared. He unlocks an Anti-Army Class Skill when ordinary power is insufficient to save those facing destruction, yet the story repeatedly places such abilities beside questions of responsibility rather than treating strength as self-justifying.

The age finally becomes a promise as well as a warning. Five years after the Shutdown, Jack reactivates the Angel System before Selfia and the gathered survivors, revealing Administrator access while the ruins glow with the mana in the air. The gesture does not restore the old civilization unchanged; it places its inheritance under a new custodian. The central question left by the Age of Angels is therefore not whether the past can return, but whether its power can be separated from the domination, selection, and hubris that destroyed it.