Taking You With Me / Literature

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• 1633 has two such moments, sort of, in a single battle. First, Eddie Cantrell (accidentally) rams his crippled speedboat into a Danish warship, followed by Hans Richter, wounded and knowing he can't make it to a safe landing, flying his plane into another warship. Hans is immortalized as a war hero. Eddie, surviving by sheer luck, is captured by the Danes, but he eventually hooks up with the Danish king's daughter and gets made an Imperial count, so he wins.
• In the short story "Above It All", some kind of creepy presence possesses the Mir space station and makes a cosmonaut kill himself. An American astronaut gets sent up to recover the cosmonaut's body and the presence gives him a mental Breaking Speech and prevents him from reaching the escape capsule. He fires the station's control jets, sending himself, the presence, and the station falling into the atmosphere, where they all burn up.
• In one of Aesop's Fables, a wasp lands on a snake's head and amuses itself by tormenting and stinging the poor snake. The snake eventually can't take it any more, so it crawls over to the side of a road and places its head underneath the wheels of a travelling cart, killing both itself and the wasp.
• K. A. Applegate's Animorphs: David attempts this in The Solution, attempting to trap Rachel in the cage with him. Naturally, the attempt fails.
• One of the stories in Assassin Fantastic involves someone trying to do this to his world after his death. It's countered by sending an assassin after him to snuff out his soul.
• In a metaphorical sense, oil tycoon Ellis Wyatt from Atlas Shrugged, when he sets his oil fields ablaze in response to laws aimed at draining him dry. He even says the trope name in almost so many words beforehand, as foreshadowing.
• In the final installment of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Bartimaeus and Nathaniel willingly share Nathaniel's body while fighting the similarly possessed government magicians whose bodies were taken over by their summoned spirits. While their plan to take down the last, most powerful spirit requires discharging enough magical power to destroy them as well, Nathaniel banishes Bartimaeus back to the spirit world at the last moment and dies alone.
• In The Bible, Judge Samson is captured by the Philistines and blinded, then put on public display in the temple. After praying to God to give him back his strength for a last time so he can go down honorably, he proceeds to tear down the pillars of said temple with his hands, crushing both himself and the Philistines and making this Older Than Feudalism (this being The Bible), as well as his Moment of Awesome.
• This is attempted in the first Bravelands book. Fearless is on a life-and-death mission to retrieve a lion cub. If he succeeds, his mother won't be kicked out of the pride. If he fails, he and his mother will both die. When the cheetahs refuse to give Ruthless back in a deal gone wrong, Fearless decides that he has nothing to lose and tries to take the cheetahs down with him. He almost kills a cheetah but is stopped when his friend Loyal appears and stops him from breaking the Code.
• Towards the end of The Builders, Bonsoir gets gut shot by Puss and starts to bleed out. He decides to light a stick of dynamite when Puss isn't looking, and both of them are killed in the ensuing explosion.
• In the Christ Clone Trilogy, Christopher Goodman as the Clone Jesus and the Antichrist knows that he's destined for Hell, so he intends to take as many people with him to hell at Jesus' Second Coming as he can, all to make God weep. He's also hoping to see Decker Hawthorne, the one who raised him and helped him become the United Nations Secretary-General, there as well, but unfortunately for him Jesus saved Decker from that fate.
• In the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, it's necessary, to disable a shard of the fire-opal, to "give" it a human life, which calls for a "taking-*it*-with-me".
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • The villainess from C. S. Lewis's The Silver Chair enchants her kingdom to self-destruct after her death specifically for this purpose.
  • A heroic (and not immediately fatal) example appears in The Last Battle, when the Calormens are trying to drive the heroes into the stable and set fire to it. King Tirian challenges the Calormen leader to a single combat, and then drags both of them through the stable door. In the BBC's audio adaptation of the book, he mentions the trope by name.
• Codex Alera has a few of these.
  • The first is Kalarus rigging the volcano that his city resides on to blow if he dies, by sealing the great fury inhabiting the volcano to him. This will kill not only his city, but any of Alera's Legions in the region. Gaius Sextus proceeds to prematurely detonate the volcano, destroying the city before his Legions could arrive.
  • Gaius Sextus gets his own moment when the Vord are assaulting Alera Imperia, and he destroys himself about 90% of their army by detonating another volcano on them.
  • High Lord Cereus diving into a vordbulk's mouth and blowing it up from the inside to prevent it smashing the wall behind which his granddaughter is hiding. As Ehren puts it, "It was one thing for a man to say he was willing to lay down his life for his child- but quite another for him to actually do it."
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian novel The Hour of the Dragon, when Valerius realizes he will never control his kingdom, he decides to ruin all his fellow conspirators in his fall.
• In The Coming of the White Worm by Clark Ashton Smith Evagh's slaying of Rlim Shaikorth also means his own death, but he was doomed anyway.
  • In a partial example, the main character's releasing the narcotic gas in Vulthoom also by Clark Ashton Smith means that he and his friend are going to die from dehydration in their drugged sleep, but the bad guys are only going to sleep a thousand years.
• Cudjo's Cave: After being mortally wounded in battle, Cudjo drags Silas The Dragon, and a former overseer who abused him before his escape from slavery, off an embankment and into the river, drowning Silas.
• In The Curse of Chalion this is how a Death Miracle works: one prays to the Bastard, who sends a demon for the soul of the target. However, the demon must take two souls before it can return, so it takes the soul of the person who asked for the miracle as well.
• Darksaber sees Admiral Daala assassinate the squabbling imperial warlords with nerve gas, so that she can unite what's left of the Empire. One of them, upon realising that he can't escape the locked room, assembles a knife from his medals, and tries to stab Daala before he succumbs. He doesn't make it, though, before keeling over.
• The entire plot of Deltora Quest 3 turns out to have been an elaborate revenge by the Shadow Lord, who set things up so that if he was defeated, Deltora would be destroyed, one way or another. All of the protagonists' efforts throughout the series are merely moving them to the next stage of the gambit, and only the fact that Lief was able to befriend and gather the last dragons is able to ultimately avert it.
• In James H. Schmitz's novel The Demon Breed, invading aliens have captured Ticos Cay, a research biologist. Knowing that they'll execute him sooner or later, he manages to stock his prison/laboratory with a large number of innocuous-looking biological specimens — which, given the correct stimulus, aren't innocuous at all.
• In Stephen King's Desperation, this is how Johnny defeats Tak.
• Devils & Thieves:
  • Old Lady Jane tells the story of a little girl named Nora, who managed to defeat the Devil by using her magic to bind them together, and then dragging him into the ocean with her, where they both died.
  • Jemmie, who was fated to die in the final battle, was dying from Darek's attack. She decided to use Blood Magic at the last moment, taking his power away from him and binding them together, dragging them both into the Sable River.
• Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files:
  • A Wizard's death curse, cast using the wizard's remaining life energy in their final moments, is a significant threat that keeps most supernaturals from taking them on directly. The simplest, but not only option is simply to use the curse to kill whoever is killing them. There are limitations still, as there are ways to kill the wizard without them knowing who did it and prevent proper targeting (such as, say a sniper rifle shot from long range), or even simply killing them quickly enough that they don't have time to react and use the curse. Someone of significant power can also repel or resist a death curse, and against such entities the curse might simply be used to weaken them, such as when one wizard used her death curse to make a powerful vampire unable to feed.
  • Battle Ground: The Einherjar go into battle against the Jotnar knowing most, if not all of them will die, but they take a considerable number of giants with them through the liberal use of explosives.
• In Frank Herbert's Dune, Doctor Yueh gives Leto a fake tooth filled with Deadly Gas with which to try to assassinate Baron Harkonnen. Leto breaks the tooth and exhales, but the Baron is able to move away just in time thanks to his personal shield, leaving Piter de Vries to take a big whiff and drop dead.
  • In the prequels, a Harkonnen does this to eliminate an extremely influential politician who was also Drunk with Power.
  • The witches of Rossak employ this tactic, by using their immense psychic powers to fry all organic brains within a large radius, cyborg and human alike.
• The main characters in Eden Green are infected with an immortal symbiote. One of their number makes it her mission to overcome its healing factor, in order to kill herself and all other infected.
• At the end of the big final battle in The Empty Grave, Marissa Fittes decides that if she's going to die, then Lucy and Lockwood are coming with her and activates a time-bomb to effect this. Lockwood tries to sacrifice himself to save Lucy, but she won't allow it, and ultimately the freed ghost of the skull from the jar ends up containing the blast and saving them both.
• In Vadim Panov's Enclaves:
  • A high-standing member of the "42" movement, suffering from a Deadly Upgrade, pulls this on the movement's leader, claiming that he betrayed their goals.
  • Kirill calmly finishes sculpting a new altar from a holy stone and sends his helpers away with the altar, then simply waits for a rival practitioner to arrive. He then proceeds to explain the situation as the now defunct temple drops from reality.
• In Dale Brown's Fatal Terrain Brad Elliot crashes the crippled Megafortress into a Chinese ICBM site.
  • In Storming Heaven a pilot crashes his F-16 into a 747 that was heading for Washington DC and aiming itself at the White House.
• In Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry, Diarmuid duels the captain of the evil army, Uathach, but is unable to hurt the monster because Uathach gigantic sword keeps him too far away. He only manages to kill Uathach by letting the gigantic sword stab him full through the left half of his torso, at which point he stabs the evil captain in the face.
• Forest Kingdom: In the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series' book 2 (Winner Takes All), after the Lord of the Gulfs tells its enemies that neither the living nor the dead can stop it, the undead sorcerer Mortice uses a Word of Power to engulf himself in flames, and then grabs hold of the Lord of the Gulfs and utterly incinerates them both.
• In Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap Cycle, Ciro implodes a singularity grenade to destroy the Amnion warship.
• Gesta Danorum: Holding out his neck for Hather to decapitate him, Starkad advises Hather that jumping between his severed head and the trunk before they can fall to the ground will protect him against being wounded in battle. Hather strikes Starkad's head off, but realizes at the last moment that Starkad intends to crush him with the weight of his falling body.
• In The Ghost Brigades, Jared takes the opportunity to, effectively, shoot both himself and his target with Chekhov's Gun. When Boutin pulls a Grand Theft Me, he discovers that Jared's last recorded message to him included a code that made the nanites that made up Jared's blood superheat and self-destruct, a move he had used to make knifing him unhelpful earlier in the novel.
• In the Marc Cerasini novel Godzilla at World's End, the heroes are ambushed by Kamakites, man-sized versions of the daikaiju Kamacuras, near the novel's climax. The heroes are bolstered by the presence of US Army Rangers, who have assault rifles, which are able to keep the Kamakites and their spears at bay for a while, before being overrun. One Ranger is speared through the gut by one of the monsters, only to pull out his sidearm and empty it into the monster's face. "They died together."
• Good Omens has Agnes Nutter, a 17th century witch who managed to take out the entire village who lynched her. Protip: Don't burn someone at the stake until you've checked their pockets for gunpowder and nails.
• In Heavy Object, Klarheit Rubyhunter attempts to take revenge for his slain comrades by crashing his bomber into a tiltrotor containing the culprits. However, the tiltrotor takes off in time to dodge the bomber and is instead destroyed by completely unrelated weaponfire. And then Klarheit, who survived the crash, has to sheepishly ask his squadron for evac due to wrecking his plane.
• In the Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot story "Wasps' Nest", John Harrison found out that his fiance Molly Deane was involved with his friend Claude Langton, and shortly after he learned that he was dying of an incurable illness and only had a few months left. Harrison had asked Langton to help him exterminate a wasp nest on his property, and planned to commit suicide by drinking cyanide, hoping to implicate Langton (whom he had convinced to use cyanide to kill the wasps) so Langton would hang for Harrison's supposed murder. Poirot uncovered Harrison's plot and secretly replaced the cyanide in his drink with bicarbonate of soda. Harrison was ultimately relieved that Poirot prevented him from going through with it.
• Mages can do this in Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar novels, overloading themselves past survivable limits to deliver a final blow to their enemy or their surroundings in a technique known as a Final Strike. Herald-Mage Vanyel finishes the Last Herald-Mage trilogy in this way, combining his own stored-away energy and his Companion Yfandes's to take out an enemy mage, immolate his army, and glass the entire valley they were attacking through.
  • In Brightly Burning Lavan does something similar after his Companion is killed, destroying the entire invading army, and shattering stone with the heat of his fire. Since she was the control mechanism for his power, it's expected.
• The Heroes of Olympus:
  • Averted. Hazel and Frank are afraid Percy’s done this to get rid of the Roman shades in Alcyoneus’s lair, but the readers know he’s fine because his water gifts will protect him from the fall.
  • Played straight during Hazel's first life, when she discovers she was being manipulated by Gaia into reviving Alcyoneus, the giant. She uses her powers as a daughter of Pluto to bring down the cave where the giant was forming, killing herself, her mother and effectively delaying the giant's revival for several decades.
• In The Hunger Games, Cato invokes this with Peeta in a headlock to get Katniss not to shoot him and send them both down to the awaiting wolf-mutts. But thanks to an arrow to the hand, it doesn't work, and only he goes down.
• In Inheritance, the final book of The Inheritance Cycle, Eragon's move that finally unhinges Galbatorix is to cast a spell, along with the power of the dragons, that causes him to feel every feeling that he's evoked in others throughout his life, both good and bad. The agony of it is so terrible that Galbatorix eventually decides he just can't take it anymore and declares "Be not!" in the Ancient Language, annihilating himself and producing a nuclear blast of energy that very nearly destroys Eragon and everyone else with him and would have likely destroyed a large portion of Uru'baen as well had they not been so far underground and had Eragon not cast the appropriate protective spell.
• In the first short story featuring Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, "Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day" Johannes has to deal with a murder-by-proxy attempt when the fairies that live in his house beneath the floorboards (the Skirtingboard people) attempt to kill him by summoning a dread force called The Bone Wind-but he has time to prepare as the wind won't arrive till mid-day. He gathers defenses for his house and a number of weapons but also, in case that will fail tinkers with his houses boiler so that it will build up and explode if he does die.
• Patriarch Heon's helper, Lancet (Ланцетник) in Nick Perumov's Keeper of the Swords series used an egg-shaped artifact to utterly burn everything in the underground catacombs, most of the remaining parts of the city above and even demolish three Magi towers when their underground command center was overrun by poisonous vermin summoned by the Magi.
• Knights of the Borrowed Dark has two:
  • Vivian takes on Dragon to buy time for the Neophytes to get away, and destroys him in the streets of Adumbral as the Cost kills her.
  • Grey is impaled by the Opening Boy's claws in the final battle, and holds the claws inside his own body in order to trap his opponent and force them both off a sheer cliff. As it turns out, both survive.
• In Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Adrian Rubisnky, the former leader of the formerly independent planet Phezzan, dying of a brain tumor, had had a brain wave monitor implanted to his brain that would cause a shitload of explosives to detonate in the event of his death. As the city in question to be blown up was the capital of the former Alliance, the interference of the cultist faction bent on destroying both the Alliance and the Empire is a given.
• In Les Misérables, Marius threatens the enemy with this when he arrives on the barricade. He has a powder keg. The National Guard leave very quickly. Unfortunately, they return later...
• Agrajag attempts this in Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe and Everything, despite having found out that Arthur Dent can't be killed yet. Result: Arthur survives, and Agrajag is dead again.
• In Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet novel Invincible, two different alien species go in for suicide attacks.
• Used in the final battle against the Cannibal Welfare Mutants in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer. "At the Academy, they taught us there was one sure way not to miss..."
• In Mistborn, this is how Vin kills Ruin. In fact, this is implied to have been the only way Ruin could have died, as Vin had recently become a god and Ruin's opposite. Because their powers were equal, only complete self-sacrifice on Vin's part would be able to destroy her opponent's consciousness. As such, both characters die.
• Moby-Dick, as quoted on the main page.
• In The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the hero Julian confronts the villain Orthis in the midst of an alien invasion Orthis has orchestrated. When Julian demonstrates that he's figured out how to nullify Orthis' greatest weapon and calls on him to surrender or be destroyed, Orthis declares, "Never! This is the end... for both of us", and activates a self-destruct mechanism that kills them both.
• Mother of Learning: With the time loop meaning that Death Is Cheap, there's actually not much opportunity for this (it wouldn't work on Red Robe and would be pointless to kill anyone who gets reset), but there are some notable cases.
  • When Quatach-Ichl becomes aware of the time loop and realises that his existence is just temporary, he immediately rushes at Zach and Zorian and detonates his own soul, hoping to damage their souls enough to stop them from escaping before the loop world collapses. Zorian is impressed, firstly by the fact that he had a technique like that (which Zorian had no idea was possible), and secondly that he was so decisive that he could use it on a moment's notice despite the fact that it would be worse than suicide in any other situation (and necromancers are not known for taking risks with their souls).
  • Zach thinks that Zorian has done this to take out Red Robe in the real world. Turns out that Zorian had bypassed Zach's mental defences and altered his memories, so he would believe he was the only survivor of the loop.
• The Night Watch (Series) features an uber-spell called "The sarcophagus of times". When used it's supposed to seal both the caster and the victim inside the said sarcophagus till the end of the Universe.
• In Nick Perumov's Ordered Universe, a wizard's sacrifice gives him enormous powers at this moment, allowing him to take down enemies far stronger than he is.
• In Otherland, the Other enacts its final bit of revenge against the villains who tormented it by crashing the satellite in which it is housed into the headquarters of J Corp, committing suicide in the most dramatic and spectacular way possible.
• At the end of Paths of Darkness Le'Lorinel breaks out a potion that mirrors all wounds he receives on Drizzt in an attempt to kill them both, because he cannot best him in battle. It almost works, too, only the arrival of Drizzt's friends keeps both of them from bleeding out. Like this only Le'lorinel dies, because the companions use their healing potion on Drizzt.
• A very restrained example in Pharaoh, where the stabbed prince stabs his murderer back with little thought.
• This backfires in Podkayne of Mars. Clark sets a small atomic bomb to go off so if their escape fails, their kidnappers won't survive either. The escape is a success but the bomb goes off and kills his sister Podkayne, who went back to save a Venusian baby.
• In A Practical Guide to Evil, dying villains can utter curses: After getting beheaded by the Lone Swordsman, Catherine (successfully) curses him to die the same day. Also, Warlock, when his defense of Thalassina gets overwhelmed, supercharges the defense-system with magical power, killing not only the attackers, but also himself and the city.
• In the Tom Clancy novel Red Storm Rising, the readers (and a Soviet general) are shown the end result of a NATO fighter that crashed into the anti-aircraft mount that shot it down.
• In the Redwall series, the Badger Lords of Salamandastron frequently invoke this trope. The Badger Lords usually do die along with whatever villain they are trying to kill.
  • Typically they use this as their Moment of Awesome. One Badger Lord essentially pile-drives a foe off a mountain. While already dying.
• The Reynard Cycle: As soon as Reynard's trap is sprung in The Baron of Maleperduys, dooming the combined Calvarian army, the Calvarian general Drauglir immediately makes a bee-line for Reynard, hoping to kill him so that all of his soldiers' deaths will not have been in vain. It doesn't work out for him.
• Garth Nix's Sabriel. The bell Astarael sends all who hear it deep into Death. Very much a last resort for the necromancer or Abhorsen who uses it, such as Sabriel's father, cornered by Kerrigor and hordes of Dead in the palace reservoir. Sabriel and Touchstone narrowly escape. In this series, though, dying isn't necessarily more than a minor obstacle.
  • Because death is relatively cheap in this series, the idea behind Astarael is to send anyone who hear it deep enough into death that they can't make it back. It speaks toward Kerrigor's power that he was able to stop himself before reaching the point of no return.
• The Saga of the Jomsvikings: After the battle of Hjorunga Bay, Vagn and the other captured Jomsvikings are set to be executed by Thorkel Leira, whom Vagn has earlier vowed to kill. As Thorkel Leira is about to behead Vagn, Bjorn the Welshman kicks Vagn so that he falls. Thorkel misses Vagn, trips and drops his sword, which accidentally cuts the fetters on Vagn's hands, and Vagn grabs the sword and kills Thorkel. Despite there still seems to be no chance for him to get away alive, Vagn voices his satisfaction that he has made good on his vow. Vagn is then saved by Jarl Erik, who takes him into his retinue.
• In Vadim Panov's Secret City:
  • The death of a Tat' Divine Lord triggers an explosion on the geologic scale — the last known location where a Tat' Lord was killed on land became the Grand Canyon.
  • Marina remains in the melee during the battle in Galla's temple with a primed grenade in her hands. She sends Sant'yaga away and simply points to the body of her fallen lover and protector Sergey.
• In the Secret Histories novel Casino Infernale, the plot revolves around the search for the mysterious Crow Lee inheritance. Eddie Drood finally finds it, only to discover that it is an artificial black hole set to activate when a member of the Drood family touches it. Fortunately for Eddie, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens have given him a Deus ex Machina.
• Septimus Heap:
  • In Physik, Queen Etheldredda unsuccessfully tries to do this with Jenna.
  • In Darke, Tertius Fume takes Alther's ghost with him as Marcia banishes him to the Darke Halls.
• Sherlock Holmes demonstrates this by going down with Moriarty, and successfully pulling this trope twice in one shot! Not only did he drag his arch-nemesis off the edge, but in a Moment of Awesome he also took his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with him. Doyle's reputation was ruined for trying to kill the greatest literary character of all time, so much so that he was forced to bring Holmes back to life in order to save it.
• At the climax of Skate the Thief, Belamy pulls a Batman Gambit against Hugo to trap them both with dozens of magical fireball rubies. Belamy, being a lich, probably assumes he'll come back from it, though.
• In Snow Crash, the Badass Biker has a hydrogen bomb on his motorcycle, rigged to explode if he dies. It doesn't go off during the book.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Before he duels Gregor Clegane, the man who raped and murdered his sister and her children, Oberyn Martell tips his spear with slow-acting poison so even if he should die, Clegane will die as well. However, it doesn't quite go as planned. Though Clegane spends days in agony he has possibly been resurrected through necromancy.
  • The Mad King Aerys II had wildfire placed around King's Landing. When Tywin Lannister attacked the city, Aerys decided to set alight the wildfire, killing Tywin, his troops, and the 500,000 people of King's Landing. However, Tywin's son Jaime Lannister became The Oathbreaker and slew Aerys. Jaime wonders if Aerys might have believed he would turn into a dragon from the wildfire and take vengeance on his enemies.
• Space Marine Battles has it happen way too often for Space Marines' health. To recount just a few examples...
  • Purging of Kallidus: Namaan goes down with an Ork Walker.
  • Legion of the Dead: Omar takes a pack of flying daemons with him.
  • Fall of Damnos: Agripped stands his ground against a Zerg Rush of Necrons.
  • Siege of Castellax: Vortsk to yet another Zerg Rush, this time Orkish.
  • Death of Antagonis: Nessus tries to do this to Volos. In a surprising twist, it doesn't work.
  • Death of Integrity: Voldo attempts this with genestealers. In a surprising twist, he survives.
• In The Spirit Thief, Nico attempts this — when the Master of the Dead Mountain throws her out of the world and among other, hungry demons, she grabs him with her and holds on so that the demons drag them all down, knowing perfectly well that she's immortal and in a few hundred years, she'll be reduces to the same insane, ravenous hunger. Fortunately, while the Master is never heard from again, Josef manages to pull her back in before the tear closes.
• In The Stand, when the US government realizes that they can't stop the spread of Captain Trips, they deliberately release the virus on the rest of the world so that no other countries can take advantage of the power vacuum caused by America's collapse.
• In Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars Khan created the Morning Star Satellite designed to destroy the ozone layer when activated, allowing him to, in his own words, "slit the world's throat."
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: One of the new additions to the canon is Operation Cinder, a "contingency plan" created by the Emperor in the event of his death. It involves the Imperial Navy using climate satellites to devastated hundreds of worlds including Palpatine's homeworld of Naboo as a massive You Have Failed Me: in Palpatine's own words, if the Empire couldn't protect him, the Empire didn't deserve to exist. Just another facet of the Emperor's It's All About Me policy.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Dark Rendezvous, Count Dooku plans one of these by aiming a missile at his mansion, in case negotiations with Yoda break down and the Jedi Master is able to defeat him. Naturally, Yoda stops the missile from hitting, by pushing it off course — but Dooku uses the opportunity to make his getaway.
  • Likewise, in The Cestus Deception, ARC Captain Nate, having discovered his own sense of individuality and a life and family outside of being a soldier in the Grand Army of the Republic, commits both TYWM and Heroic Sacrifice by ordering an orbital bombardment down on his own coordinates to ensure Cestus's corrupt leaders don't escape the planet. His romantic interest is revealed to be pregnant with his child in the epilogue.
  • Many Sith and Dark Jedi in Legends have a power that lets them violently explode upon being mortally wounded, like the Emperor does in Return of the Jedi. It's strong enough to be very dangerous at close range — unfortunately for the Dark Jedi and Sith, in all of the books where this happens the people who kill them are also canny enough to get out of the way.
  • I, Jedi: Jedi Master Nejaa Halcyon is impaled through the chest by dark Jedi Nikkos Tyris in a lightsaber duel. He uses Tutaminis to drain Tyris's lightsaber dry and then telekinetically fling Tyris into a faraway wall; Tyris is killed instantly on impact.
  • According to supplemental material ("The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia" and the Essential Guides series), Grand Admiral Joseph Grunger turned warlord, built up an armada and invaded the Corellian sector as a stepping-stone on his way to attacking and conquering Coruscant for himself, only to be intercepted by Danetta Pitta, another Grand Admiral-turned-warlord (who had become the protectorate of the Corellian sector), over the planet Tralus. In the resulting battle, Pitta's forces destroyed most of Grunger's; in retaliation, Grunger — who knew he was losing, and was now driven by a need to assuage his wounded pride — ended the battle by ramming his Super Star Destroyer, the Aggressor, into Pitta's Torpedo Sphere and killing his rival at the cost of his own life.
• In the Eoin Colfer novel The Supernaturalist, a hero, Stefan Bashkir, after being mortally wounded at the end of the book, attempts to drag villain Ellen Faustino to a fiery death in a literal dead man's grip. Subverted in that Bashkir dies and Faustino survives (albeit horribly disfigured) to continue her evil plan.
• Survivor Dogs: Moon and her packmate Lucky try to stop a pack of foxes from taking her pups. It proves very difficult to fight off six foxes on their own. Bloody and beaten, Lucky decides that if he dies in the fight, he'll bring the foxes with him. Luckily, his packmates help him a few moments later. They still lose one of the pups, and Mulch, to the foxes.
• In The Sword-Edged Blonde, when Canino gets shot and Gretchen pulls the arrow out to ensure that he bleeds to death, Canino is left with enough time to stab her before he goes. She doesn't seem to care.
• In Sword of Truth: Wizard's First Rule, there's a spell mentioned called "Wizard's Life Fire." A wizard who knows this spell can sacrifice his life and go out in one big fireball.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • The Balrog attempts this against Gandalf. Gandalf makes it mutual. Both "succeed", such as it is: Gandalf slays the Balrog, but succumbs to his wounds. Later, he returns.
    • This is what the Ents intend when they march to punish Saruman for his transgressions against nature. Being normally peaceful, they have no expectation of victory, and on their self-proclaimed Last March, they chant "To Isengard we come. To Doom we come. With Doom we come." What they don't realise is that Saruman has just sent the entirety of his vast army to Rohan, and is completely unprepared for an attack by ambulatory trees. The result is a Curb-Stomp Battle with only one stated casualty on the Ent side.
  • The Fall of Gondolin: two Balrogs die at the siege of Gondolin, but so do their opponents: Ecthelion dies of his wounds, and Glorfindel kills a Balrog by knocking them both off a cliff.
  • The Children of Húrin: After Turin stabs him, Glaurung restores the memory of Turin's pregnant wife, who realizes she is Nienor, Turin's sister. She kills herself and shortly after, Turin finds out and throws himself on his sword.
• In The Tomorrow Series, Robyn goes out this way, taking out a traitorious Australian at the cost of her own life.
• In Victoria, the high-tech Amazons of Azania are very proud of their all-female utopia, and hate and fear all men, who would abuse and enslave them. When their republic is about to fall to their enemies, they are so desperate and terrified that they opt for arming a thousand-megaton nuclear bomb under their capital, to save themselves from a fate worse than death and take the enemy army with them, too. Subverted, in that the enemies cajole the operator into surrendering, and the bomb never goes off. The Azanians are then made wives, and/or slaves, of the conquerors.
• In Warren the 13th, Big Bad Aunt Annaconda eventually decides that if she can't have the All-Seeing Eye, then no one can, so she starts casting a spell to kill everyone.
• In the climax of the fifth Warrior Cats book, Bluestar charges the leader of the dog pack and knocks him into the gorge; she lands on the edge but as the dog falls he manages to bite one of her legs and drag her in after him. She survives only long enough to have a final conversation and reconcile herself with her kits.
• In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, there is a technique wherein you allow your defenses open so your opponent stabs their weapon into your body. Thus hindered, you then counterattack, killing them but likely dying in the process. The protagonist using it doesn't die.
  • Neither does the antagonist at that time. When the Big Bad can move dead souls into new bodies that doesn't mean much, but the protagonist fights the antagonist who inhabits the same body later in the series. Neither of them die in the first duel, but both are grievously wounded.
  • Another character does this same thing in the final book to a different villain. The hero is a master swordsman, but the villain is slightly better. When the villain tells him that he can't win, he replies "I didn't come here to win. I came here to kill you" - and deliberately allows himself to be stabbed, intending to perform a Mutual Kill. The villain dies, but the hero is rescued and magically healed.
• In Worm, Armsmaster attempts this against the serial killer Mannequin, reasoning that while he doesn't deserve to live, Mannequin will kill hundreds more if he is allowed to escape. It doesn't take and Mannequin simply beats Armsmaster to within an inch of his life before leaving a mocking message.
  • Later, the supervillain Blasto is trapped in a sealed room with Bonesaw and Defiant. Bonesaw has modified herself so that if she dies, her body will release hundreds of deadly plagues. While the room is hermetically sealed and Defiant is armored, Blasto is not, but he resigns himself to his fate if it means that Bonesaw will die. it doesn't take and Blasto ends up as Bonesaw's slave.
  • In 22.4, Skitter does this to Tagg. It took this time. On Tagg, at least.
    "I had only the chance to think of how they'd just signed Tagg’s death warrant, that my power would work while I was unconscious. I could have rescinded the order in the last moments. I didn't."

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