Maybe the least relevant title to content?
or maybe the title is lost in context since every character is the most unlike they have ever been in the series and this book is all about coming to terms and impressing upon the naive that the only choices left to make in war are terrible choices.
spoilers
everyone dies or you find a few more soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves.
It's pretty difficult watching the gang pedantically and repeatedly explain to their parents that the life they thought they had is gone and people are dying and getting hurt. and you can't choose the moral high road unless you're willing to sacrifice others.
and the Animorphs have to hold the line on this reasoning because they're the only ones who really understand where the line is.
This is the controversial (as I remember it) decision to recruit disabled kids to be soldiers, because they're sure that the yeerks don't want any physically disabled bodies.
The ending really shocked me, I figured Cassie was going to kill Tom so that Jake didn't have to, and they could recover the morphing cube, I completely forgot that she bit Jake to slow him down and allow Tom to get away with the morphing cube because of her HUNCH that letting him have the morphing cube with the right thing to do.
that is a brassy hunch.
yea it's absolutely crazy! These concluding books, even though I had read through the whole thing before, shocked me on the last reread all over again.
you're right about the expansion of the size of their forces completely changing the game, I think it's really interesting how the authors name and count every single individual added to the animorphs, it's a good way to make you keep in mind that even though there are more kids, every single one is a person individually deciding to go to actual war and take real risks.