TIME
Musutafu was flattened, its buildings smashed and scattered like a kicked sandcastle. Trees sprouted from cracks in the pavement, and a few skittish animals scurried across broken glass and strewn rubble. Bones lay in heaps, scraped clean and cracked open by scavengers.
Izuku was a hero. Heroes saved people. There were no people. There was no one left to give him a directive, so all that remained was to wait.
Days blurred into months. Months morphed into years. The sun swung in coiling loops, sweeping across the sky, flickering so fast the sky turned a bluish-red of almost-twilight. Animals and birds flitted by, seldom stopping for more than a casual sniff of the bizarre statue surveying the land. Plants grew in wild tangles, withered or burned away, then grew from the bare earth. Trees grew, towering over the horizon, then fell to decay or storms or lightning. The land heaved, mountains rising as tectonic plates ground against each other, then shrinking as wind and water scoured them away.
Millennia passed. All traces of mankind disappeared under countless generations of winter freezes and plant growth. Entire species came and went. The seas rose, submerging Izuku, then just as quickly receded, leaving barren soil as far as the horizon stretched. The sun swelled in the sky like a vast, angry pimple, then shrank in on itself and burst with cosmic radiation. Earth's magnetic field crumpled like a soda can, and the deluge of ions and photons scoured the surface clean.
And still, Izuku waited.
Stars swirled in the sky, growing larger and closer as the universe squeezed itself together. Black holes sprouted like mushrooms, swallowing stars and engulfing planets until all that remained was a swirling, unstable mass and the lone witness of the universe's death.
Matter collapsed in on itself. A pulse of energy rippled through the empty space, coalescing into stray quarks that clung together into the first atoms. The swirling cloud of matter flew apart in every direction, swirling in eddies and whirlpools that grew into stars. Hydrogen became helium, then carbon, then iron, and all the other elements of existence forged in their fiery hearts. Stars shrunk inwards, or swelled and burst, scattering their heavier elements. They floated around other stars, drawn together by gravity, until they formed the first planets.
Carbon and iron cooled. Hydrogen and oxygen came together in flashes of heat and light to form the first rain upon the new planet. Galvinized molecules formed proteins. Those proteins replicated themselves, then grew together into bacteria. Bacteria ate each other, made more complicated structures, photosynthesized and evolved, until life sprung once again. Fish wriggled onto land. Dinosaurs guarded their eggs. Monkeys stuck sticks into termite mounds. Mankind huddled around the first manmade fire, forged bronze in a covered pit, sailed under starlight and planted wheat. Civilizations rose and fell.
And one day, in Musutafu Japan, Izuku came hurtling down from space, landed in front of an inventor's home, and knocked on the door.
"I'm home, mom."
500
In which the world ends, and Izuku waits for a new one. And this time, Izuku arrives 65 million years early and accidentally wipes out all the dinosaurs. Whoops.