There is an old video game called Lords of Magic in which the Order faction (which is about unified effort towards the greater good) has as its top-level spell “Heroic Demise”. Mechanically the spell gives one unit a big boost to all its stats, but the catch is that at the end of the battle that unit always counts as having been killed.

I was very reluctant to use it when I was a little kid because I didn’t want to kill my own units, but of course the lesson is that units will die anyway and fewer will die in total if you deliberately sacrifice some. Very thematically appropriate…