Kageyuki, former lord of Unato Station and father to Miyuki, spearheaded the campaign to reclaim Unato from kabane five years before the central conflict. Though he fell in battle against the kabane, sustaining mortal wounds, he cheated death by strangling himself preemptively—halting his transformation into a mindless kabane and reawakening as a sentient kabaneri. His soldiers, horrified by his hybrid state, turned on him. Miyuki shielded him from their blades but perished in the assault. Consumed by anguish, Kageyuki slaughtered his traitorous troops and sank his teeth into Miyuki’s lifeless body, hoping to resurrect her as a kabane.

The bite catalyzed a fused kabane colony centered on Miyuki’s cocooned form, its eerie blue glow pulsing at the heart of Unato. Kageyuki lingered within the hive, commanding the region’s kabane through psychic bonds. His crusade was fueled by obsessive grief, a refusal to relinquish Miyuki’s existence even as it warped into monstrosity.

At the Battle of Unato, he sabotaged human alliances by directing kabane assaults with tactical precision. Confronted at the colony’s core, he rejected pleas for mercy, deriding humanity’s hypocrisy and his own irreversible damnation. After mortally wounding Unmo, a one-time comrade, he clashed with Mumei. His defeat ruptured Miyuki’s cocoon, unleashing her as a rampaging Black Fog that consumed all until the allied forces destroyed it. Broken and adrift in his final moments, Kageyuki watched snowfall blanket the ruins—a fleeting purity mirroring the dissolution of his vengeance and the daughter he could never reclaim.