The Yeerk response is immediate: they abandon their silent invasion and launch all-out warfare. In the ensuing chaos, Marco, Rachel and Cassie are all killed, while Jake and Ax meet up and manage to raid the Blade Ship and kill Visser Three. They take control of the Blade Ship and plan to use it to destroy the Yeerk Pool Ship, at which point the Drode and the Ellimist interrupt the timeline, returning the deceased characters to life and returning everyone's memories. The Drode complains that the events in this timeline are doomed to cause failure, and the Ellimist reveals that Cassie is an anomaly, a rare individual who is grounded in the true timeline and will disrupt any other timelines that try to take its place -- explaining Cassie's constant feeling that something was not right. It is also revealed that the Ellimist manipulated events (or as the Drode exclaims in disgust, "stacked the deck") to ensure that Cassie, Marco, Tobias, and Ax -- the anomaly, the son of Visser One's host, Elfangor's paradoxical son, and Elfangor's brother -- were all Animorphs; Rachel apparently became an Animorph through chance alone.