Eriksonian Stages
6: isolation
He can't sway that fool. It's like they're the last two pieces on the board, chasing each other endlessly. So he backs away. He doesn't take his pawns. He'll find a way to conquer this logical puzzle before he returns.
It's difficult, but also enlightening. Because he learns so many things about humans and they're all the more pitiful. Stubborn fools. Grandiose fools. Pitiful fools.
They're all fools, and he witnesses them all.
And he witnesses time as well. Time that makes people who'd been young appear old and wrinkled and at the end of frayed ropes. People who've run out of time chasing dreams they never quite grasped.
Fools who'd wasted their lives chasing the unattainable.
And if he couldn't conquer his school in seven years…
He's heading that way. And right now, he's heading that way too.
It's all valuable, but it's also a marker of his own mortality, his own ineptness.
That is why he has his pawns in waiting. And also, something to circumvent his impending sand-timer.
People really are fools if they have immortality at their disposal and then lament their impending doom.
He won't be such a fool. Immortality will give him the world.