Dexter's Ending

Dexter's Ending is the tenth and final puzzle of Athena Puzzles Season 1. It was created by SlumberousCarp2.

The first team to solve this puzzle (and hence, the winner of season 1) was the Untitled Puzzle Team. It was solved by Verhvouvim.

Puzzle
Upon reaching this puzzle, each team would be presented with this image:

Hints
5 minutes - The chessboard is a square but the key is linear

10 minutes - Chess is a War

15 minutes - ''The inventor was a genius. The enemy had no idea.''

20 minutes - The white dashed while the black stood on their spot

25 minutes - Recieving a single tone sound

30 minutes - The colors match to a long and short version

Solution
Despite what it may look like, this puzzle has nothing to do with chess, but was in fact a Morse code puzzle. Each black piece represented a dot while each white piece represented a dash. Using this, you would get the following string of dots and dashes:

..-....---.-...--.

Each rank (row) of the chessboard represents one letter in the word, so you would add the spaces accordingly:

.. -. ... --- .-.. .- -.

When you convert this to plaintext, you get the answer: Insolate.

Solvers
Teams who solved this puzzle, in order: Untitled Puzzle Team (Verhvouvim), ßig ßrain ßoys (squid), Doge (Xx_Doge420_xX), The Cult of Gaze (Zahra), South Asian Boys (Airborne)