"How can you justify people dying for no reason?" Marco countered. "People die in war all the time. That's unavoidable. But an exam's not a battlefield. There's no tactical gain to be had, and if people are dying then you're already getting a tactical loss because you've now got fewer people who could have been useful later. They're certainly not going to be any use at all if they're dead."

Out of the Animorphs, Marco had always been the one who was ruthless. The one who saw the way to end goal, what needed to be done, and did it, even if doing it wasn't the 'morally' right option. But he'd never approved of killing for the sake of killing. It was never about the end justifying the means - it was about weight up the cost of acting, and the cost of not acting, and deciding which one was worse. The lesser of two evils.

Letting twelve year olds not just die, but die for no point was just not going toright with Marco.

"And sorry, but your team and training being your fail safe is bullshit. Because if you've got someone dying every exam, then that's near certain odds that the fail safes don't work for at least one person. And how many people take this exam, anyway? I'd guess not many, since most people aren't insane enough to decide to take a deadly test. Which means the percentage of people dying probably isn't negligible, and your fail safes are failing too often."