- Narrator: All six Animorphs
After a grueling battle, Jake privately wishes that he never walked through the construction site and met Elfangor. Unfortunately, Crayak was listening in...
Tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: Cassie doesn't bother learning whether her parents are just being naïve about the invading, body-snatching brain slugs, or they've been taken and become Controllers.
- Batter Up!: Rachel arms herself with a baseball bat to save Jake and Marco from Temrash 114.
- Cold Open: This book doesn't open with the usual "My name is...", which gets shunted to the second chapter. Instead, the Animorphs pick themselves up after a grisly battle and exhaustedly demorph and go home.
- Call a Human a "Meatbag": Temrash, the Yeerk infesting Tom, is last seen cackling hysterically, calling out to Rachel that humans are nothing more than Yeerk meat.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Ax calls the shark he acquires a Blue Blade, with the reasoning that it's made entirely of triangular edges.
- Cosmic Retcon: When the Drode's plan fails, the Ellimist returns things back to normal, telling the Animorphs that only Cassie will vaguely remember this adventure.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him:
- Odret 177 is revealed to be a spy for Visser One, causing Visser Three to execute him and Tobias on the spot before they can properly react.
- Visser Three himself is partially vaporized by the suddenly-alive-again Cassie.
- Dwindling Party: Without the power to morph, the would-have-been Animorphs fall one by one. Tobias never makes it to their resistance because he gets infested. Marco is killed when Temrash 114 calls in a Bug Fighter for backup when Rachel defeats him. Rachel is cut down by a Hork-Bajir Controller as they run into the Blade ship. Cassie is vaporized by Dracon fire shortly afterward. Jake is wounded by Visser Three when he tries to interfere with his fight against Ax, and it's clear that Ax lost the tail fight between himself and the Visser.
- Equivalent Exchange: The Ellimist and Crayak were both allowed to meddle with time just once. The Ellimist's meddling happened on some far-off planet, while Crayak changes the timeline so that the Animorphs never come to be.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: Ax is shown talking to himself while still trapped in the Dome, and taking actions he doesn't remember doing a minute later. The text implies that some of the things he 'forgets' are actually elements of the altered timeline falling apart, but that just adds to his uneasiness.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Even from Rachel's POV, we don't get a description of the attack that kills her, only her body's reaction to it. It's implied that she loses her head.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: During the battle in the mall, Rachel uses a decapitated Hork-Bajir's head to kill another Hork-Bajir Controller.
- I'm Cold... So Cold...: A human-Controller bleeding to death in the first chapter keeps saying this. Jake asks the Yeerk to leave the man to die free, but the Yeerk can't get out thanks to a wound Jake inflicted on him earlier.
- In Spite of a Nail: Even without the power to morph, Jake, Marco, Cassie, and Rachel join Ax in fighting back against the Yeerk invasion. They actually manage to kill Visser Three and end the war, at the cost of millions of humans dying in the crossfire.
- It's a Wonderful Plot: Jake wishes he could go back to being a normal kid, and Crayak proceeds to grant that wish by making it so the would-have-been Animorphs never cut through the abandoned construction site where Elfangor crash-landed. Without the Animorphs, the Yeerks make huge strides in conquering Earth before Ax makes their invasion public, causing an open war between humans and Controllers.
- Jackass Genie: Through the Drode's prodding, Crayak manages to get Jake to wish for a world where he didn't become an Animorph, knowing full well that Jake doesn't actually want that wish granted.
- Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Crayak prevents the Animorphs from forming, which causes the Yeerk invasion to go mostly unimpeded. Despite this, the would-have-been Animorphs manage to edge out a win against the Yeerks.
- Moment of Weakness: The Drode comes to Jake during one where the Animorphs won some kind of Pyrrhic Victory to trick him into making the wish.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Temrash 114 is unable to act enough like Tom that Jake notices and follows him to the TV station to find out what's up, and finds that The Sharing is a bigger conspiracy than he thought.
- Quality vs. Quantity: It becomes apparent during the open invasion that Yeerks are the quality, as their technology and Hork-Bajir hosts can make quick work of humans, and humans are the quantity, as there's enough humans to hold the line against a few hundred human, Hork-Bajir, and Taxxon-Controllers for a decent amount of time.
- Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: Visser Three manages to intimidate Odret 177 into spilling what Visser One ordered him to do, then executes him with the reasoning that he's not going to wait for Odret to betray him too.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Cassie turns out to be a temporal anomaly that can sense how the timeline is supposed to be, allowing her to alert her friends into action before the action really starts. As it turns out, the Ellimist hand-picked her for the Animorphs for this reason, as her remembering causes the modified timeline to destabilize.
- Threatening Shark: The book reveals how Ax acquired his tiger shark morph. Suffice to say, he had a more difficult time than he expected trying to hold it still long enough to touch it.
- Time Crash: Thanks to Cassie's temporal anomaly, the main timeline starts leaking into the modified timeline, with Visser One suddenly being on Earth when she would have been elsewhere, Jake partially morphing to tiger when under stress, and previously deceased characters to coming back to life.
- Time Stands Still: The Drode finally has enough when Jake and Ax fire the Blade ship's weapons on the Pool ship, and stops time before the Dracon cannon reaches its target.
- Use Their Own Weapon Against Them:
- Jake and Rachel manage to steal a two Dracon beams from the Controllers sent to apprehend them. They're effective against individual Controllers, but even both fired at once can't take out a Bug Fighter.
- The final part of Ax's plan is to hijack the Blade ship and fire on the Pool ship, which nearly comes to pass.
- What If?: Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Marco never meet Elfangor or gain their morphing powers. As a result, Tobias joins The Sharing and becomes a Controller, Ax frees himself from the sunken Dome and alerts the humans to the aliens among them, Marco sees Visser One and chases after her, which causes him and Rachel to come under fire from Dracon beams.
