As he falls, he wonders about the concept of death.
Death, as he understands it, is unpleasant. It is a sudden and painful rescinding of every sort of agency you had as a living being.
He doesn't know death, though. He only knows sleep. His vision never fades to white, it fades to black. Somewhere, down the line, someone will need him again, and he will reawaken.
But will he?
A shattered piece of Weil's horn drifts past, and his attention is suddenly given to the ground, which seemed reassuringly distant only a few moments ago. Approaching at an increasingly fast pace, an already foregone conclusion dawns on him. He scowls.
Something explodes behind him, and he turns to look. Another chunk of Weil's misshapen, abominable corpse has had enough with the turbulence, and rockets past him in a million shards. His scowl worsens. This man, this one man, for whom power was everything, had singlehandedly almost ended the world thrice under his watch. He wanted only for the world to bow, and had wrought nothing but sorrow.
To be instrumental in his end was, perhaps, too much to ask—but he'd been granted it anyway, and the piper's outstretched hand began to look increasingly empty as the seconds stretched on, and the earth grew nearer. He was thankful, he thought, that there was nothing but desert where he was about to land.
People that told him about death always described some bright light at the end of a dark tunnel, or seeing the events of your life flashing before your eyes. Should he ever meet them again, he decided to call them liars. As death approached, he didn't feel serene, or some great sense of purpose.
He felt hot. He could feel his heatsinks working overtime as he desperately tried to not explode, he could feel the aggressive hum of a generator in his chest, and most of all, he felt stupid. Someone of greater integrity, he thought, might have been able to find a way to put an end to all of this without killing himself—X probably could have done it.
Zero imagined that he might've felt something cold inside, but the heat seemed more pervasive than ever. He stared at the desert as he approached, and mouthed something distasteful just before the impact shook the earth.