Kaori

Kaori is ambitious about her career and emotionally entangled with the person responsible for editing her work. Being considered for weekly serialization places her close to a major professional opportunity.

Her relationship with Kazuya complicates that opportunity. Their affair mixes professional dependence with private intimacy, and her pregnancy introduces consequences extending well beyond whether her manga receives a serialization slot.

The manga gives her comparatively little characterization outside this professional and personal situation.

Kaori is a manga creator whose work has progressed far enough for her to be considered for weekly serialization.

That makes her an aspiring professional rather than merely a hobbyist, although the series does not establish detailed information about her artistic specialty or published bibliography.

She has no established martial-arts training, unusual physical ability or specialist survival experience.

Kaori appears through the publishing-industry side of the story. Her circumstances show another part of the professional environment in which Hideo Suzuki has struggled to establish himself.

Her potential serialization and pregnancy create two major uncertainties in her ordinary life just as reports of bizarre violence begin spreading.

The outbreak rapidly makes the publishing concerns that previously governed her future increasingly irrelevant, folding Kaori's personal storyline into the wider collapse.

Kazuya is Kaori's editor and affair partner. Kaori tells Kazuya that she is pregnant with his child.

Hideo Suzuki belongs to the same broader manga industry, although Kaori's established storyline centers on Kazuya and her own prospective serialization rather than a close relationship with Hideo.