On the battlefield, the seven male Valar had shattered the earth countless times over. Were it not for Sylas repeatedly using time reversal to restore the devastation, the world of Arda would have collapsed and been utterly destroyed long ago. Even so, some areas were so severely damaged that not even time could heal them.
Seven Valar attacked Morgoth together, yet with the Flame Imperishable at his command, the Dark Enemy was virtually invincible. All destructive attacks failed to harm him.
Meanwhile, Sylas dealt with Ungoliant.
His strength now far surpassed their previous encounter. Even resurrected and empowered by the Flame, Ungoliant posed no lethal threat to him. But the great spider regarded Sylas as a mortal enemy and fought with a fury beyond reason, eyes blazing red with hatred. She spun vast nets of dark webbing, attempting to encircle and trap him.
Sylas advanced without hesitation. His hands moved with effortless precision, manipulating time itself: decelerating Ungoliant's movements to a crawl while accelerating his own to near the speed of light. To the naked eye, he simply vanished.
He reappeared directly before Ungoliant and delivered a single blow, seemingly harmless, carrying no visible destructive force.
But a heartbeat later, the flow of time within Ungoliant became chaotic. A devastating temporal implosion erupted from her body, creating a vacuum in the timeline, erasing her from existence across every dimension of space and time. Ungoliant did not even have time to scream before she dissolved into dust.
It was as though she had never existed.
Her essence was cast back to the primordial darkness of the outer Void, the place from which she had first emerged.
At the same time, the seven Valier battled the Nameless Thing.
Varda led the assault. Her dominion over light directly countered the creature's nature of dark chaos, searing its form with every pulse of radiance. Yavanna summoned colossal vines that bound the creature's body. Estë, the Vala of rest and healing, worked to lull the creature into a state of dormancy. The other Valier cooperated in concert.
Finally, Vairë, the Weaver, drew upon her authority over fate itself. She wove a tapestry of death, a specific, inescapable doom crafted for the Nameless Thing alone.
Under the combined efforts of all seven Valier, the creature was purified and destroyed.
But before Sylas or the Valier could draw a single breath, Morgoth raised the Flame Imperishable and resurrected both Ungoliant and the Nameless Thing in an instant.
Possessing the Flame was equivalent to possessing an infinite resurrection. Every effort to destroy his servants was rendered meaningless.
Or so it seemed.
Sylas noticed something. He looked sharply toward Morgoth and caught it: a fluctuation in the Dark Enemy's power, a brief but unmistakable instability following the double resurrection. Morgoth's reserves had dipped.
The Flame Imperishable's resurrections were not free.
The Valar noticed it too. A wave of renewed hope passed through their ranks.
Morgoth read their thoughts and laughed, his expression contemptuous.
"Resurrecting them certainly costs me power. But how many times can you kill them? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? By then, tell me, who will fall first, you or me?"
Without a word, the Valar and Sylas attacked in perfect unison, committing to a war of attrition.
One year. Two years. Three years.
The battle raged without pause.
Ungoliant was slain by Sylas again and again, each time by a different method. The Nameless Thing was destroyed by the Valier repeatedly. After being killed dozens of times, Ungoliant developed a psychological terror of Sylas so profound that she could no longer face him without trembling. Had Morgoth not maintained control over her soul, she would have fled the battlefield entirely.
But after being slain countless times with no possibility of escape, Ungoliant went completely mad. Embracing the knowledge that Morgoth would resurrect her regardless, she abandoned all self-preservation. She began charging directly at Sylas and detonating herself at point-blank range, trading her own death for the chance to wound him.
Facing this suicidal tactic, a living bomb that could regenerate endlessly, Sylas grew wary. He no longer dared to close distance carelessly.
For a time, the battlefield reached a stalemate.
But what gave the Valar a glimmer of hope was that with every resurrection of Ungoliant and the Nameless Thing, Morgoth's power diminished. Gradually, the combined assault began to gain the upper hand. Tulkas, the Champion, finally succeeded in landing a devastating blow on Morgoth, severing one of his legs.
Though Morgoth restored the limb almost immediately using the Flame, the wound itself was proof: he could be hurt. He was weakening.
The war between the two sides lasted a thousand years.
Arda was destroyed and rebuilt over and over. Though Sylas used time reversal continuously to restore what was broken, and the other Valar poured their strength into maintaining the world's structure, the world's fundamental essence was being steadily depleted. Each cycle of destruction and restoration consumed more than the last returned.
Finally, Arda could endure no more.
The land was torn apart completely and swallowed by the encroaching sea. Space was shattered. Time became chaotic and disordered. The spherical world of Arda collapsed like a deflated sphere, and everything returned to nothingness.
The Valar, Sylas, and Morgoth stood in the void of the ruined universe, gazing upon the remnants of what had once been the world.
The Valar's expressions were heavy with grief and reluctant sorrow. They had created this world with their own hands, shaped it through the Great Music, and now watched it die. Their faces burned with anger and resentment toward the one who had caused this.
Morgoth, however, wore a look of triumph and barely contained excitement.
Arda was destroyed, but its World Origin remained.
The World Origin was the foundation upon which Arda's existence rested. So long as it persisted, the Valar could use it to recreate the world and begin a new age. But Morgoth intended to seize it. Using the Flame Imperishable as a core, he would melt the World Origin down, reshape it according to his will, create new life, and thereby become the new Creator God.
Morgoth released the Flame Imperishable from his palm, transforming it into a conflagration that engulfed the entire shattered remnants of Arda, intent on reducing the World Origin to raw material.
The Valar could not allow this. They abandoned any thought of attrition and threw themselves at Morgoth with everything they had, fighting desperately to stop him.
On the far side of the battlefield, Sylas had just killed Ungoliant once more. He watched the great spider resurrect yet again, her maddened form immediately charging toward him for another suicidal detonation.
A cold glint appeared in Sylas's eyes.
He could not kill her permanently while Morgoth lived. But he could no longer afford to waste time on her. He needed to be free to face Morgoth directly. He wanted the Flame Imperishable.
He needed a different solution.
Sylas charged directly toward Ungoliant. Just as she was about to self-destruct, he froze time.
Ungoliant, with her Vala-level strength, could break free of the temporal stasis within moments. But Sylas needed only a single second.
In that frozen heartbeat, the world spun. Ungoliant vanished from the battlefield and reappeared inside Sylas's body.