Dragon 3: Tide of the Black Moon (1)

"Then what's the difference between you and the school board assholes? The Caesar group is like a flock of lambs going to the altar by themselves! And the shepherd who leads this team of lambs to the sacrifice is a devil!"

"The devil? Do you mean me?" Schneider looked up.

"Who else can I say? I finally understand the meaning of that phrase now! The men in the equipment department are all psychopaths, but the men in the execution department are all madmen; the men in the equipment department are ignorant of the preciousness of human life while the men in the execution department are indifferent!" Manstein yelled down, "Is that all you see in your fucking mission? You don't care how many people die for your fucking mission, do you? You sit here like you're smoking a cigarette with a sad face, talking melodramatically about your dead students, but you're sending a new generation of fucking students to hell! If I were your mother I would regret giving birth to this asshole!"

"You can't be my mother, you're a male." Schneider said coldly, "Manstein, sometimes I envy you. Because you live in a clean world with people like Guderian, not sin-eaters like me and the rector."

"Sin-eaters?"

"It's the kind of person who devours sin. Not everything right in this world is right, and not everything right is necessarily right. There's a sophomoric question. Where the railroad splits, there are warning signs erected on one side of the tracks because trains will pass this way and none on the abandoned tracks on the other side. Now the train is coming and you're standing by the fork and a hundred kids are playing on the track the train is going to pass on, and they completely ignore the warning sign, while a lone kid is playing on the abandoned track because he's following the rules. You can toggle the switchbacks, do you toggle them? If you don't trigger it, then a hundred kids will die, and that's a hundred disobedient kids; if you trigger it, the train will go over that side of the tracks and only one kid will run over, but that's an obedient kid." Schneider looked Manstein straight in the eye, "My dear Professor Manstein, do you know how to wrench a switch?"

Manstein froze. He couldn't answer the question, it was damned sophistry, was it more important to listen or was it more important to live? If you don't pull the trigger, how do you deal with the grief of a hundred children's parents when they arrive on the scene? Did they deserve to die because they were a group of disobedient children? But how can you let the lone obedient child die if you pull the switch? He did nothing wrong, and perhaps even pointed to the warning sign to remind everyone not to go near the tracks over there ...... how could he let that innocent child die?

"Time is over, while you think about whether to trigger the turnout, a hundred children are already dead." Schneider said faintly, "You didn't make a choice, you just watched it all happen."

"What choice would you have made?" Manstein asked hoarsely.

"I would have wrenched the fork in the road, and though I killed one child, I saved a hundred. In this way I am the Sin Eater; I did the right thing but did evil. I ate the sin so that others could be good and innocent."

"You are sophistry!" Manstein said.

"There's no need for that, I wouldn't even be telling you this if you weren't my friend." Schneider shook his head, "I did send the Kaiser team on a dangerous mission, but it was a last resort, we couldn't let that embryo hatch in the polar abyss. The sooner we do it, the better, while it is still not self-aware. Waiting at this point is just hesitation, hesitation just gives your opponent more time to prepare, that's what the principal said. If Caesar's group is thus overthrown, this sin will be eaten by me."

"I thought you would at least consider Chu Zhang, all this time you cared about his safety," Manstein said feebly.

"Chu Zhang, Lu Mingfei, or Caesar, in the eyes of the executive branch, are just different weapons, we care if the weapon is intact, but if that leaves the sword unsheathed, then the weapon loses its value! Remember the transmitter I implanted in Chu's molar?" Schneider pushed his cell phone in front of Manstein, the screen showing a map of Japan with red dots of light flashing at regular intervals.