The black-haired girl had finally arrived at David's adult years.
He had graduated from high school and attempted to go to college.
David wasn't the smartest man out there and never enjoyed school, so after only his first semester, he dropped out and started working at a sandwich shop.
The sandwich shop didn't pay much, but it was enough for him to afford the smallest apartment he could find, finally allowing him to break free from the abuse at home.
When he left his family behind, he felt like he finally had his life under control somewhat.
Despite not living in a nice place nor earning much money, David was relieved and had started to feel happy.
After working at the sandwich shop for a year, he became the assistant manager and was in charge of doing interviews for new employees.
One applicant happened to be a beautiful girl named Ellen who always seemed to be happy no matter what was thrown at her.
Although David was quite attracted to her, he was a responsible young man and only cared if she was fit for the job.
Being a simple sandwich shop, his only concerns were whether she had a good work ethic, was good with customers, and whether she would call in often or not.
Ellen had checked all of his boxes and she insisted on starting work that same day.
David was impressed and gave her a spare uniform and apron, telling her to stay in the back to do food prep for the day while she could learn the ins-and-outs the next day.
She was very enthusiastic and learned everything quickly.
Over the next few months, David and Ellen got closer and had become best friends.
He learned that her parents were quite wealthy and she continued to live with them despite being almost 19 years old and having her own job.
Her parents were very kind and extremely supportive of her, wanting to keep her as close to the nest as possible until she was truly ready to go out on her own.
David wasn't envious or jealous of Ellen's family situation and instead felt happy for her to not have had to suffer even a fraction of what he had to.
A year after Ellen had been hired, David became the manager of the sandwich shop and hired a couple more people to help them out since it was now only him and Ellen, a guy named Zack and a girl named Annie.
Zack and Annie learned the ropes fairly quickly and the four of them enjoyed working together.
When David and Ellen were 20 years old, Ellen had started to flirt with him during and after working hours.
Despite his past relationships never working out, David was quick to catch feelings and return the flirting, eventually becoming lovers with her.
Ellen had never judged David for his past, his looks, or his scars. She was like the angel that came into his life and brought him true happiness.
David struggled to show his affection, but Ellen never minded it.
At 21, they moved into a small apartment together and got a dog.
Although the pay at the sandwich shop was good now that he was the manager, David wanted to go into his preferred field of work, IT.
He got lucky and landed a temp job as a customer service representative in a call center while Ellen took over his position as manager of the sandwich shop.
The temp job was only a few months long, but he showed such good technical and troubleshooting skills that he was actually hired on to the core IT department of the company, learning how to work with the various systems and acquiring more skills.
With a beautiful and kind girlfriend as well as his dream job that didn't even require a college degree, David felt the happiest he ever has in his entire life.
At 22, David and Ellen got married.
Their wedding wasn't big and only involved Ellen's family and some friends. David's family had no idea about his marriage and he wasn't going to tell them either.
It was yet another one of David's happiest moments of his life.
The black-haired girl was jealous of Ellen, but she was still extremely happy to see that David was finally having a good life.
At 23, David and Ellen bought a house.
David had moved up to become a core systems administrator and everyone who got his help was very happy to interact with him and not get talked down to like some of his colleagues would do.
Ellen continued her job as the manager of the sandwich shop. When David asked why she didn't want to get another job, she would just tell him that she liked the atmosphere and the people.
Seeing nothing wrong with her answer, David just smiled and let the love of his life continue doing as she liked.
He felt bad because he often worked late nights and would come home to Ellen already asleep, but he didn't regret it as he was doing the job he loved in order to provide for the woman he loved.
David talked about starting a family and having children with Ellen, but she would always say she wasn't ready or that they were too young.
Seeing nothing wrong with her answer, David just smiled and waited for his angel to be ready.
On David's 24th birthday, he called Ellen to let her know that he would be late coming home once again because he had to deal with a big server outage, something reasonably believable given the past reasons he stayed late.
However, David just wanted to surprise his wife by coming home early and spending the rest of the day in bed with her.
On his way home, he hummed happily and felt like this would surprise Ellen quite a bit.
Unfortunately, it did indeed surprise Ellen quite a bit, as well as David.
As David walked in through the front door, he heard loud noises coming from the bedroom.
Curious, he decided to check it out.
When he got closer, he could hear his wife panting and moaning, as well as the sound of a man grunting.
His face went pale as he opened the bedroom door to find his wife, Ellen, having sex with his old employee from the sandwich shop, Zack.
The moment he opened the door, the two of them saw him and Ellen's eyes went wide while Zack just smirked mockingly at David.
"David, this isn't what it looks like!" Ellen shouted, covering herself up with the blankets on the bed.
"..."
David didn't say anything in response to Ellen's cliched words. He started to play back all the times she stayed at work late, went over to a friend's house, and why she never quit her job.
He thought he was numb to the betrayal of women, but just when he felt like he was on Cloud 9, he immediately got plunged into the deep abyss.
At that moment, something in David snapped.
"It's okay, Ellen. I hope you enjoy the rest of your life with him," David said.
He turned around, closed the door, and walked to the living room, ignoring the stunned Ellen.
Before Zack or Ellen could leave the bedroom, David grabbed all the easily moveable furniture and quickly stacked it up in front of the bedroom door.
He blocked off the door with furniture until it was physically impossible to open the door from the inside.
With no windows in the bedroom, it made it impossible to escape from the room.
With a calm smile on his face, David went out into the garage, grabbed the can of gasoline near the lawn mower as well as the lighter on his workbench and poured the gas on the furniture blockade.
He then put the gas can back in the garage before walking back in and setting the blockade on fire.
"Y'know, this is probably what I should've expected...," he said.
Still maintaining his calm smile, David sat on the couch in the living room as the house quickly caught fire.
Some gas managed to leak into the bedroom so the insides caught fire fairly quickly.
"AHHHHH!!!"
David heard the agonizing screams of both Zack and Ellen, but he shut his eyes and let his tears fall.
"I'm sure she never loved me, but it still hurts nonetheless."
He had never thought about hurting Ellen in the past, he only wanted to love her and her to love him. However, the pain that this betrayal caused made David lose a valuable part of himself.
"Oh well, what's done is done... 'Til death do us part, right?"
The black-haired girl stood up from her sitting position and ran to the window in front of her.
"DAVID, NO! THAT BITCH! DAMMIT, THAT BITCH!"
She was screaming her lungs out as she continuously beat on the window, wishing she could break through it and pull David out of the burning house.
Alas, she didn't have the power to interfere yet and could only watch.
When she saw David close his eyes, she slumped to the ground helplessly and started beating on it, taking out all of her frustrations and despair.
Then, she remembered what she had read in Rasiel in the past. David doesn't die until he's 30 years old, meaning this doesn't kill him.
The black-haired girl stopped crying and returned to her previous sitting position, resuming her observation.
Back in the window she was watching, David was sitting on the couch until he lost consciousness due to the smoke inhalation, falling asleep with a smile on his face.
However, just like the black-haired girl thought, he didn't die.
Instead, he woke up in the hospital with severe burns all over his body and his wrist handcuffed to the hospital bed.
He wasn't recovered to the point where he could talk yet so he spent three months cuffed to the bed, bombarded with interrogations by police officers.
There was no proof that David had set the fire, but all signs pointed to him being the culprit due to the dead and burned bodies of his wife and her lover, as well as the furniture blocking the room's entrance.
Despite all the pressure, David's head was empty. He was devoid of any guilt, anger, sense of loss, depression, happiness, anything at all really. He only felt disappointed that he didn't die.
David easily lied through his teeth, denying any involvement with the fire whatsoever.
Ellen's parents had hired multiple expensive lawyers, but David still got away with the double homicide.
Although he was able to go free due to the lack of evidence or a confession, he was transferred to the psychiatric ward as it was clear he wasn't okay mentally.
9 months later, on his 25th birthday, he was released from the hospital.
Despite the expensive treatment he got that allowed him to function again, his body was still covered in burn scars.
Unsurprisingly, he was fired from his job due to not showing up for a year, but he was able to carry on due to the money he had saved up over the past few years.
While it wasn't a lot of money, it was enough for him to rent a shitty tiny apartment in a bad neighborhood for a while.
He was able to find another IT job, but it had to be a remote job as he couldn't go anywhere or physically interact with people.
In such a big city, his situation wasn't well-known so an employer that didn't do thorough background checks hired him easily.
David still did his job perfectly. He only left his apartment to buy cup noodles and alcohol, creating an extremely unhealthy diet that always left him feeling empty when work was over.
He worked tirelessly for about a month before he decided to do something that would give him the smallest bit of peace.
As someone who enjoyed watching anime and reading manga to get away from the world throughout his life, he started reading fanfics posted online.
He got very attached to them, but felt that something was missing in them.
So, he decided to start writing his own called 'Saving Kurumi.'
The premise of it was simple, gratifying, and made him happy.
Kurumi Tokisaki from Date a Live was pulled from her universe and brought into one filled with various characters from all sorts of franchises.
Since she was devastated after killing her best friend, Sawa Yamauchi, David decided to pull Sawa in as well.
He would alter their powers so that they would be humans rather than Spirits, but they'd have all of their abilities and then some.
Kurumi would be given a system that allowed her to receive rewards whenever she was genuinely happy. Throughout the story, Kurumi made friends with a large amount of female characters, but David never wrote her as having any romantic relationships.
Although he convinced himself that he was slowly getting over his past relationships and the murder of his wife, David still didn't want anything to do with love, at least not love with real people.
David's mind was still absolutely broken so he fell deeply into the fictional world he created.
With every chapter written, he would fall in love with the Kurumi Tokisaki he created more and more.
His only wish was to make this fake, plagiarized, bastardized version of Kurumi happy, no matter how shitty his story was.
When he couldn't think of what to write for the next chapter, he would just spend his time worldbuilding. He created more and more runes for the people in this world to use, he came up with non-canon events for other franchises to give Kurumi a chance to bond with her friends more, and he even personified the power that makes up the universe as an extra overpowered friend for Kurumi.
David knew his story was bad, but he didn't care. He ignored all of the keyboard warriors that criticized him and his work and only cared about making Kurumi happy for 5 more years, only stopping at the end of March, 2025.
The black-haired girl was extremely emotional watching David create the story.
"Silly man...," she said as she sniffed and wiped her eyes.
"I bet you never thought that the main character of your story would find out, right? Well I'm here now and I promise, I'll take you away with me... I won't be like Ellen or any of the other girls in your past. I'll gather up all of my friends for you so you can be surrounded by love. As long as you love me, Kurumi Tokisaki, I will be happy!"
The black-haired girl, Kurumi Tokisaki, felt her chest tighten as she watched David walking in the street one night.
A car passed by him with the window rolled down as someone in the passenger seat stuck a gun out of the window and started firing at a group of shady-looking people in front of a building.
While the group of people were shot and killed, David was unfortunately a victim as well.
Wrong place, wrong time.
Kurumi jumped up once more as she saw David falling to the ground, but yet again, she could do nothing but bang on the window and scream.
Suddenly, she felt herself getting dizzy and saw a bright light before she reappeared in the center of a ritual circle in her school's library.
After collecting her thoughts and reading the reminder she left for herself 30 years prior, she stood up and went back to find her best friend, Sawa.
"Don't worry, darling... I'll come up with a way to save you, no matter how long it takes..."