Reckless Motivation

432, as an individual, was never intelligent.
What he was, however, is incredibly lucky.
He was curious, sure, and most certainly ambitious, but if not for luck, he would not have gotten as far as he did.
He only did realise this upon leaving the Second Realm for the first time.
The concept belittled him. All of his successes, boiled down to luck? Surely not. Surely he had something, some gift, some skill?
This is exactly why, upon finding out the universe was dying, he viewed it not as a crisis, but as an opportunity. An opportunity to prove to everyone, to the universe, and most importantly to himself that luck was but one of many factors that helped him, and that he he didn’t need to rely on it for his success.
But from his failure onwards, he noticed every single lucky turn that helped him survive.

In the Fifth, the geometry was brutal, the time dilation was unforgiving and the Wards were violently honest. The Wards spoke only the truth - he knew this - and so hearing them splay all his insecurities across the stars and beyond crushed him harder than the unfeeling landscape. To hear the truth, the pure truth, for the first time, destroyed him in a way only honesty could.
He should’ve died. He wanted to die, he was prepared to.
But he didn’t.
Of course he didn’t.

The Fourth crushed him in a different way entirely, but with the same amount of force. His insecurities were not directly pointed out to him, but were instead invited into his mind by the environment. The fact that he, and all of his work, were reduced to crutches for these beings to discover their own world… it was terrible. He was just one of infinitely many numbers in their System. One of the less important ones, too. And what made it ever worse is that, in the end, in his Realm, all of the wars fought, all the numbers lost, all the property destroyed affected a grand total of nothing. None of it mattered; of course it didn’t, why would it? We are just numbers after all! Nothing but a logical mechanism.

By the time he left the Fourth, 432 had assembled a newfound sympathy for the beings in the Realms below them, and simultaneously, a hate for those above, and for his own kind. Syro wasn’t lost, he was free. No longer forced into a supportive role by the inhabitants of the Third, allowed to be his own.

This time, luck would have nothing to do with his actions.
Luck wouldn’t want him to do this.

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