[15] The Truth About the No. 2 Who Betrayed Me and the Reason I Forgave Him | The Confession of a 'Traitor' Who Broke Down in Tears at Torikizoku

Several years had passed since 'that morning' when I lost everything. My company had breathed again from the mud, and we were moving forward powerfully once more toward a buyout worth several hundred million yen.

Then, one day, a LINE notification lit up on my smartphone screen.
For a moment, I couldn't understand who the message was from.

'Long time no see. How are you?'

The sender was the very person who had poached 80% of my employees and pushed me to the bottom of hell. It was that 'traitorous No. 2'.

It was such an anticlimactically normal message from someone I had been furious with and even wanted to kill.

Yet, strangely, what welled up in my heart was not hatred, but a quiet emotion, like when you see a message from a 'comrade-in-arms who fought alongside you in the past'.

I replied quite normally to that short message, which seemed to be trying to gauge my feelings.

'I'm doing great! How about you?'

That became the catalyst for us to meet again for the first time in years and share a drink. The place was 'Torikizoku' in Kabukicho.

Thinking it would be awkward with just the two of us, I brought along an office worker from our founding days who had stayed with the company on that day of the mass resignation and knew him well.

■ The traitor who became small and transparent

Ten minutes before the appointed time, I stepped into the noisy Torikizoku and found him already sitting alone in the corner of a table.

The moment I saw him, I lost my words.

There was no trace of the confident man who had slammed a thick stack of resignation letters onto my desk and coldly declared, 'Thank you for everything until now.'

His body looked a size smaller, he lacked presence, and he had so little vitality that he looked almost transparent.

When our eyes met, he bowed his head slightly with a look of apology and fear. There was no light in his eyes at all.

Intuition told me that 'something must have happened,' so as soon as I sat down, I quietly asked him how he had been since then.

The reality he described was far too raw to be called mere karma.

Immediately after he went independent from my company, his business got off to a smooth start.
However, the fact that he had 'poached all the employees from his original company to go independent' quickly spread to business partners in our small industry.

'That guy can't be trusted.'
'He's a person who would return evil for good without a second thought.'
With the loss of trust, his business performance gradually began to decline.

When the money runs out, the relationship ends.
The former host employees who had admired and followed him so closely also left him, one by one.

In the end, he couldn't even sell the company and it quietly went out of business.
He, who once earned millions of yen a month and lived in luxury as my right-hand man, is now said to be making a living as a 'temporary employee'.

As I listened to his story in silence, the negative emotions that had been sealed deep within my heart had disappeared completely before I knew it.

Why did he reach out now?
I didn't understand at first, but as I listened to him, I began to grasp it.

He simply wanted 'me' to listen to his helpless current situation and his past mistakes.

■ The Sobbing Man and the Real Reason for the Betrayal

'...Why were you able to pull off such a perfect betrayal?'

I hit him directly with the biggest question I had always wanted to ask.
Was it resentment toward me, or an obsession with money?

Then, he twisted his downcast face into a mess and said this.

'I... I just wanted to prove to you, big brother, that I could do this much. I wanted you to recognize my ability...'

The moment he said those words, despite the noisy interior of the Torikizoku, he began to sob loudly enough that the surrounding customers were taken aback and turned to look.

It wasn't hatred for me, nor was it dissatisfaction with the company.

The pride of 'being an organization I built myself'
An intense desire for approval from me, his mentor

It was an incredibly twisted form of self-validation, born solely from the desire to show me, 'Look how strong I am.'

Watching him sob, I felt as if I were looking at myself back when I was being pushed around by the owner of a host club, burning with dark ambition to 'show him someday.'

■ The 'Double Brainwashing' Tactic That Blinded Me

However, there was one more thing I had to ask.

'You... you used the 'art of winning people's hearts' that I taught you... against me, didn't you?'

Wiping away his tears, he nodded slightly. Then, he began to talk about the 'applied techniques of his own' that he had devised to blind me and brainwash the employees.

In conclusion, he had evolved the 'scapegoat act' I taught him into a diabolical 'Double Black Box of Information' technique.

To me, he would act out self-sacrifice, saying,
'I'll take the heat for all the dissatisfaction on the front lines. You should focus on the bigger picture, big brother,' completely cutting me off from the real information on the ground.

Meanwhile, to the staff on the front lines, he would say,
'The president doesn't see what's happening on the ground and just makes unreasonable demands. But I'll be your shield and protect you from him, so just follow me,' effectively painting me as an 'invisible common enemy' and positioning himself as their sole savior.

He made it look to both sides as if he were 'taking the heat for their sake,' while monopolizing the intersection of all information.

It was a terrifying brainwashing technique that even I, the one who created the organization, failed to notice, leaving me comfortably blinded.

(※ The horror of this 'double complicity' and the concrete methods for removing this cancer from an organization are too long to cover here, so I will summarize them in detail in a separate article at a later date.)

■ Forgiveness. And once again, master and disciple

By the time I finished hearing his whole story, all the hesitation and dissatisfaction that had possessed him had fallen away, and there sat just one clumsy, straightforward 'No. 2'.

The man who took everything from me.

But when I saw him, having borne the weight of that crime and punishment alone, reduced to a tattered temporary worker, what came out of my mouth was neither a lecture nor a sarcastic remark.

'...Shall we do this together again?'

I genuinely wanted to help him somehow.
There was a bond of 'master and disciple' there, thicker than blood, understood only by us who had raced through that era of madness together and seen hell.

Currently, he has pulled himself together once more, launched his own company again, and has begun walking the path as an entrepreneur.

And now that I have bought out my company for several hundred million yen, I am working with him again in a three-legged race as a 'consultant' for the business he is running.

Truth is stranger than any movie.

Next time, the final episode. The fall from being an elite, extreme poverty, night work, and the betrayal of my beloved disciple. Why did my 'pathetic resume,' which stepped on every landmine in life, end up creating hundreds of millions of yen in value?

Now, to you who are in the depths of despair in life, I send my final cheer.

📖 What will be told in the following story (17 parts in total)

1. Self-introduction article
2. Memories of the day we went from a 20 million yen annual income household to a destitute single-parent home at age 7
3. My destitute elementary school days
4. Junior high school days when reality hit me
5. Why didn't I turn to delinquency?
6. Choosing a high school with no basis
7. Dropping out of high school at 16 / Becoming a NEET
8. The story of how I raised my deviation score to 73, but failed all entrance exams after two years of ronin
9. Becoming a 'host' to earn money
10. From extreme life in Kabukicho to reaching a peak monthly income of 10 million yen
11. Entrepreneurship -> I blew through my savings in an instant
12. The morning that vanished in 3 minutes due to my protégé's betrayal: 1
13. The morning that vanished in 3 minutes due to my protégé's betrayal: 2
14. Rebuilding a company on the verge of bankruptcy
15. Reunion with the protégé who betrayed me
Last Buyout for hundreds of millions
Afterword The buyout was the wrong answer