Chapter 3: Stairways Shouldn't Be That Hard

It's been a long time since Trad had been walking again.

He was holding onto a straight stairway in a completely white space, where he couldn't see anything but the black creature right ahead of him, leading him the right way.

It had been almost 20 minutes since he met the reaper. After the reaper's failure, he opened some kind of crack in the air, leading them to the space they were in now.

Trad wasn't bothered at all by the fact that he was walking on what seemed like an endless stairway, but he was still holding the bag of money in his arm, and also, the reaper made him take the body of his victim in his other hand, which made it feel a bit too heavy.

"Hey..."

"What?"

"Are you really sure that this guy won't just... wake up and bite me, or something like that?"

"Why would something like that happen?"

"I don't think that's the kind of question I should try to answer right now..."

Now that Trad wasn't in a dark place anymore, he wondered again about the reaper's face, trying to get a better view from the side.

"What are you doing? You said you weren't a person who doesn't care about their life."

"What do you mean?"

"Take a look! You're on the edge of the ladder?"

"Oh... really?"

"What were you trying to do?"

"Oh, c'mon! You really expected me to see anything in this... place?"

"Anyway," the creature sighed heavily, "just walk in a straight line before me. We're almost there."

"Really?"

At this point, Trad was feeling a bit tired. He hadn't eaten a proper meal in the last 24 hours, and that extra heaviness was making it difficult for him.

"Are you already tired? You're weaker than you look."

"I'm not weak. Actually, you're the weak one here!"

"What do you mean?"

"We're just here because you couldn't do your job properly, and as if that wasn't enough, you gave me the job of carrying this... this guy."

"Well, if carrying things is a problem for you, why don't you just leave the bag?"

"Don't talk about my bag!"

"Why?"

"Its value is huge."

"Value? So, you're saying you care about the bag?"

"It's not about the bag, it's about what's inside it," Trad said, as if delivering a philosophical quote.

"Oh... humans are really strange... anyway, here we are."

Trad looked up, and a black door was there. Everything was white, so he couldn't tell if it was at the end of the stairway, if the stairway continued, or even if the door was just floating there. But it seemed to be positioned a bit to the right.

"Get ready. We're going to leave."