Characters / Sword Art Online - Antagonists

Sword Art Online Main Character Index
Main series: Major Characters (Kazuto Kirigaya, Asuna Yuuki, Shino Asada, Eugeo, Alice Zuberg) | Aincrad | Alfheim Online | Gun Gale Online | Underworld (Integrity Knights, Dark Territory) | Unital Ring | Antagonists (Laughing Coffin, Nobuyuki Sugou) | Bosses | Others
Alternative Gun Gale Online Characters: Team LPFM | Team SHINC | Team MMTM | Others
Video Game Continuity | Gameverse Characters (Gameverse Main Characters) | Mobile Game Exclusives

Real world names are in western naming order. Followed by their online name and worlds they played in.^note If only the online name is known, then display as normal.

This page details the antagonists of each story arc.

Note: Unmarked spoilers ahead. If you're starting the anime, do not read this page!

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For antagonists with their own pages see the following:

• Laughing Coffin
• Nobuyuki Sugou / Oberon

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Aincrad

Akihiko Kayaba / Heathcliff

Akihiko Kayaba / Heathcliff (SAO)

Kayaba voiced by: Kōichi Yamadera (Japanese), Marc Diraison (English, Season 1-Ordinal Scale), David W. Collins (English, Alicization), Dafnis Fernández (Latin American Spanish), Luis Porcar (European Spanish)

Heathcliff voiced by: Tōru Ōkawa (Japanese), Kevin M. Connolly (English), Luis Porcar (European Spanish), Rafael Pacheco (Latin American Spanish)

^{Click here to see Heathcliff}

"Players, I welcome you all to my world. My name is Kayaba Akihiko. Right now, I am the only person who can control this world."

The creator of Sword Art Online and the man responsible for trapping ten thousand players in his game of death, Kayaba is the Big Bad of the Aincrad arc and the most important villain of the entire series. He is eventually revealed to be participating in his own game, under the guise of a legendary player known as Heathcliff. As Heathcliff, he is the leader of Knights of the Blood, and the strongest guild in the game. Known as "The Holy Sword", Heathcliff has a reputation of his HP never having dropped below 50%. He possesses the Unique Skill "Holy Sword", which lets him use his tower shield as an offensive weapon. Eventually Heathcliff is exposed by Kirito as Kayaba, who as a reward offers the opportunity to duel him and end the death game early.

Following his defeat, Kayaba would go on to perform a Brain Uploading which killed his real body but allowed him to continue existing as a Virtual Ghost and an occasional ally to Kirito.

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• Affably Evil: He might be a deluded mass-murderer, causing the death of thousands of players, but aside from this he's actually quite reasonable. Kayaba has his own code that he follows and will not cross the line, even stepping in to help the heroes when villains worse than him show up. He's overall a Fair-Play Villain who gives players a fighting chance and doesn't make the game any harder than originally intended, even joining them as Heathcliff to help them clear it.
• Anti-Villain: Make no mistake, he's definitely the villain. But it's left up to interpretation on whether he's inherently evil. While his desire to live out his dream of creating a real virtual world did cause him to endanger 50,000 lives, he does not take joy in their deaths and gave them a fair chance to escape. In fact he even joined the players and genuinely aided them in clearing the game. Leaving aside the fact he's the creator of the Deadly Game, he's otherwise very noble and chivalrous, being a Benevolent Boss to his guild and organizing the players to give them the best chance to beat each Floor Boss. In fact Memory Defrag reveals he even took time out to train certain players who he saw potential in, so that one day they could surpass him. For this reason, he's the only Big Bad who Kirito does not outright despise and respects as a Worthy Opponent to a degree.
• Big Bad: Of the Aincrad arc, being responsible for trapping all the players in SAO as well as having a big presence as Heathcliff. He can also be thought of as the central antagonist for the whole series, given that everything that followed later on was made possible because of him. Heroes like Kirito were created while villains like Laughing Coffin reared their heads and would go and spread further evil. He also remains around for the whole series, albeit as more of a Big Good who assists Kirito from the sidelines.
• Big Bad Ensemble: In the Aincrad arc, he creates the world and is ultimately responsible for all the troubles the characters go through by extension but he also has to share the spotlight with the leader of the Laughing Coffin Guild, Vassago Cassals, whose player hunting becomes a secondary but very substantial threat.
• Big Damn Heroes: In both identities.
  • As Kayaba
    • At the end of the Fairy Dance arc, his spirit seemingly comes back from the dead to give Kirito his Administrator privileges so he can defeat Sugou.
    • In the Alicization arc, he hijacks a robot body to prevent Ocean Turtle from being blown up by defusing the bomb that the remaining GDS operators implanted.
  • As Heathcliff;
    • In Integral Factor he pulls this several times, first on the Floor 11 boss fight where he shields the Player from the Boss and coordinates an attack. Later on Floor 12 he saves Leafa from a guild of orange players looking to kill her.
• Big Good:
  • As Heathcliff, he's the head of the number one guild on the front line, he's the highest authority among the heroes clearing levels for the others, although he often leaves leadership to Asuna and his other subordinates. Too bad he's actually the Final Boss.
  • Zigzagged with Kayaba. While he is more of a neutral than a flat-out good guy in later arcs, he's willing to humiliate Sugou by giving Kirito his GM privileges and save Ocean Turtle by hijacking a robot body and ruining the GDS' plan to destroy it because he thinks that they've gone too far.
• Cast as a Mask: To hide his true identity, Kayaba and Heathcliff are given different voice actors in Japanese, English and Latin Spanish dubs. Averted in the European Spanish dub.
• Cold Ham: While Kayaba never raises his voice in any of his personas above normal speaking volume, even in battle, the sheer coldness of the gentlemanly-malice dripping from his every word can practically freeze lava solid.
• Evil Counterpart: To Kirito.
  • Both are virtual reality junkies, with their goals for the virtual world and the real world to be one and the same. Both are the strongest players in SAO and possess a Unique Skill, however while Kirito's Dual Wielding greatly amps up his attack but can leave him defenseless, Heathcliff's Divine Blade bolsters both his attack and defense simultaneously. While Kirito is a solo player who got shunned for being a Beater, Kayaba as Heathcliff is the Big Good who leads the largest guild in the game and is highly respected. Kayaba had suspected Kirito would be the one to face him in the Final Battle and become The Hero of the story up against himself as the villain.
  • Specifically, Heathcliff also falls into foil territory. Kirito is Dark Is Not Evil solo player who is ostracized for being a Beater, while Heathcliff is the Light Is Good highly respected leader of the strongest guild in SAO. Both are the strongest players in the game and possess unique skills, but while Kirito's Dual Wielding can leave him defenseless, Heathcliff's Divine Blade bolsters both his attack and defense and he is virtually untouchable.
• Fair-Play Villain:
  • He traps ten thousand players in a virtual reality video game, and promises to let them out when the defeat the 100th floor boss. The game is fairly balanced, and so on, which starts to show this, but the real point comes when Kirito defeats the final boss (Kayaba, it turns out) on the 75th floor. Kayaba keeps his word and lets everyone out.
  • Zigzagged by Heathcliff, his alter ego who has an exceptionally powerful unique skill that even people in-universe consider broken. He also is immortal after taking a certain amount of damage and explicitly cheats during his first duel with Kirito. The game may have been fair, but his place in it sure as hell wasn't, albeit he's also helping the players clear the floors, but planning to betray everyone at the highest floor, while giving a bonus for Kirito to prematurely win the game and free everyone when Kirito exposes his identity, and as his second and final duel with Kirito shows, he intentionally turns off his admin privileges to give his opponent a fighting chance as the game's Final Boss.
• Graceful Loser: When defeated three-quarters of the way through the planned SAO, Kayaba congratulates Kirito and Asuna, and lets them both live and return to the real world, even though they had both "died" in the virtual world.
• Icy Gray Eyes: His gray eyes are described as "metallic" in the light novel, and (despite being calm and soft-spoken) Kayaba has little to no empathy with a disregard for human life, even his own. He retains his gray eye color as Heathcliff.
• Informed Attribute: Kirito states that, despite invoking heavy stakes, Kayaba has ultimately made SAO a fair game. While this is often proven true, such as him making it impossible to PK another player in a safe zone without some clever Loophole Abuse^note  a prime example being having an unconscious player accept a duel request then killing them, some of the things that actually occur in SAO bring the validity of this statement into question.
  • Played With in regards to the Illfang Boss, as well as subsequent ones, where the changes he made to the bosses end up taking the Clearing Force off-guard, even leading to a casualty in the form of Diaval at the hands of Illfang's Nodachi. That being said, Progressive reveals that there was a quest that leads to a mural depicting the boss with the changes, and the Floor 2 Boss had a similar quest, Implying that despite the changes, he did include ways for Players to find out about them and plan accordingly. And to be fair, they probably should have at least suspected that the Beta wouldn't be like the final product...
  • Above point aside, many of the bosses he designed could be seen In-Universe as That One Boss. Such examples include:
    • Fuscus the Vacant Colossus, who's not only capable of moving his weakpoint, but can even block off the Boss Room door, preventing players from escaping.
    • The Gleam Eyes mainly appeared difficult since the ALS rushed in against it despite being tired and under-levelled, forcing Kirito, Asuna and Fuurinkazan to fight it then and there, but he's fought in a Anti-Crystal Zone, preventing the use of Teleport Crystals, limiting tactical retreat options, and Healing Crystals, forcing players to rely on cheaper but less effective potions.
    • The Skull Reaper, whose basics attacks are effectively One Hit Kills and, like The Gleam Eyes above, is fought in an Anti-Crystal Zone. It also couldn't be properly scouted like previous bosses since, along with the inability to use Teleport Crytals, the doors were impossible to open once closed and he only appeared once the doors were closed, meaning they couldn't have just simply peeked in.
    • As Heathcliff, he cheated during his first duel with Kirito by using his admin privileges to briefly make himself faster to counter Kirito's Super-Reflexes, as well as making himself Nigh-Invulnerable so he'd survive every boss fight he took part in. Plus, while making himself the Final Boss is rather fitting, he ultimately has an unfair advantage due to knowing every single Sword Skill, having designed them himself, and therefore knowing how to counter them. He basically made himself the opposite of a Final-Exam Boss.
• Lack of Empathy: He cares nothing for the deaths of the players in SAO, treating it more like an inevitable consequence of living in the world he created. Even in front of him doesn't get a reaction out of him, and doesn't care about their loss. His lack of reaction to the many victims in the arduous battle against the Skull Reaper is what gives Kirito a "Eureka!" Moment, and clues him that Heathcliff is actually Kayaba. Unlike most examples, however, he isn't malicious about it, just indifferent.
• Moral Sociopathy: He trapped thousands of people in his death game and cares little about them, but he's a Fair-Play Villain who gave the players a legitimate means of escape and he keeps his own rules even when it costs him his life.
• The Scapegoat: When SAO ended, many of the PKers and other criminals went unpunished for any deaths they caused since, as Kayaba was the one who created the device that actually did the deed and there was was no definite way of determining if one player killed another, all the deaths that occurred were pinned on him.
• The Stoic: He always has a calm demeanor. The only time he ever shows he's Not So Stoic is letting off surprise when Kirito attacks him and exposes him as an Immortal Object, proving he is Akihiko Kayaba.
• Villain Respect: He's genuinely impressed that Kirito and Asuna were able to defy the physics of his game through sheer force of will. In his mind, this essentially proves the tenacity of humans — which was what he was trying to study all along.
  • Comes up again in the Fairy Dance arc when Kirito, defeated by Sugou's GM powers, is visited by Kayaba's ghost, who is confused by how Kirito has seemingly given in to Sugou's power. He then gives Kirito his admin access to level the playing field.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Zig-Zagged. It's hinted that the A.I.s in SAO, like Kizmel, are rather advanced by his design and, he steps in to help save the Ocean Turtle, and by extension the Underworld and the Artificial Fluctlights living in it, from the GDS' bomb. However, back in SAO, he ordered the Cardinal system to prevent Yui from interacting with the players, likely knowing that she possessed a sense of empathy and would otherwise be Forced to Watch as the players cross the Despair Event Horizon and even be Driven to Suicide.
• Worthy Opponent: Develops this relationship with Kirito, as the player granted Dual Wielding, Kayaba envisioned him as the hero who would fight him as the Final Boss of Aincrad. Both Kirito and Kayaba possess a level of respect for each other, despite being enemies. Upon Kayaba's defeat, the two seem to have transitioned to becoming friendly enemies with Kayaba willing to help Kirito out against the later Big Bads who are worse than him.

Tropes specific to Kayaba

• Always a Bigger Fish: So Sugou is the GM of Fairy Dance, effectively making him the ruler and God of ALO. Along comes Kayaba's Virtual Ghost, giving Kirito his user ID which outranks that of Sugou's! Sugou immediately gets his admin credentials stripped away and Kirito pays him back for every horrible thing he's done.
• Always Someone Better: To Sugou Nobuyuki. During the climax of the Fairy Dance arc, Kayaba is able to easily override Sugou's admin privileges and give them to Kirito, and in response, Sugou whines and throws a temper tantrum, screaming about how even in death, Kayaba's showing him up.
• Ambition Is Evil: He tells Kirito of his dream about creating a floating castle as the basis for creating Sword Art Online.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Kayaba scanning his brain and uploading himself into the system at the end of the Aincrad arc seems to be treated as such. Although his physical body is no longer alive, he lives on as a Virtual Ghost having become one with the system that he worked so hard to create.
• Badass Bookworm: He programmed all of SAO, and designed the hardware, by himself. Even after his death he created a program that revived the VRMMORPG genre in the aftermath of the Fairy Dance arc.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: His extreme Lack of Empathy creates this. He weighed 10,000 human lives versus him creating his ideal world and chose the latter, but feels neither any guilt nor joy at the deaths. He's actually happy that someone is coming to kill him as that is how Aincrad is supposed to work.
• Brain Uploading: He uploads his consciousness to the internet at the end of the Aincrad arc. This involved a deep scan that fried his brain, thus destroying his body. He shows up again in Fairy Dance and Underworld.
• Brainy Brunette: Kayaba has gray-brown hair and is the genius scientist who developed Sword Art Online as well as designed the NerveGear, Cardinal System, and Seed, having been part of the Shigemura Lab in the institute's Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department.
• The Chooser of the One:
  • He’s this to Kirito in Aincrad, albeit indirectly at first. He made it so that the Unique Skill, Dual Wielding, would go to the player with the fastest reaction time and intended them to face him in the Final Battle, though at the time he had no idea it would be Kirito. Though by the time he meets Kirito in person, he already knew Kirito was the one who would fight him.
  • A more direct example in the Fairy Dance arc where Kayaba's Virtual Ghost provides Divine Intervention to give Kirito the means to defeat Sugou by giving him access to his admin privileges. Later on, he also chooses Kirito to be the one to receive the World Seed, confident that Kirito had the passion to see that the Virtual World would continue existing.
• Create Your Own Hero: It is his trapping of the players in SAO that led to Kazuto Kirigaya becoming Kirito the greatest hero of the virtual world. He even programmed the game to grant the dual-wielding skill to player with the fastest reaction speed because he planned on this player becoming the hero that would defeat the final boss and save everyone.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Nearly averted; he created and sold an extremely popular total-immersion virtual reality game, presumably making truckloads of money off it. But then he decided to remove the logout button and fry the brains of anyone who dies in the game. He also enters the game himself, and eventually disables his God Mode, allowing Kirito to kill him... making him a meta-version of a Tactical Suicide Boss. Why? He wanted to be the villainous god common in JRPGs, and even planned to be the Final Boss. Sugou/Oberon lampshades it during the Fairy Dance arc:
  Sugou: Mr. Kayaba was a genius, but he was also a fool. All he wanted to use his technology for was his game. He couldn't see the potential in it.
• Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: Once Kirito defeats him, Kayaba is given the blame for everyone who died as a result of his death game, while the Player Killers, who knew or didn't believe that killing other players would kill them in real-life, get off with counseling at worst (well, those that survived the game did—many PKers were PKed in turn).
• Deus ex Machina: Serves as this in ALO, as it is through Kayaba's Heathcliff avatar that Kirito assumes superuser control of the system. Since this is effectively a god granting a hero divine power, it's like a modernized classical example.
• Ex-Big Bad: After his initial goals of seeing SAO to the end were complete, Kayaba performs a Brain Uploading and remains around for the rest of the series as a Virtual Ghost, becoming a Friendly Enemy to Kirito and often assisting him when he's in a tight spot.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Doctor Kayaba has a surprisingly humanizing relationship with fellow PHD student Kojiro Rinko, whose love for him seems to be genuinely reciprocated, even if he's a mass-murderer who trapped thousands of players in a death-game. Around her, and her alone, does he dare to be vulnerable and honest about realizing the futility of truly achieving his fantastic boyhood dreams. Even though he did plant an explosive in her left breast out of fear she'll disclose the location of his body to the police while his mind adventured in Aincrad, he never detonated it, and she remained in return faithful to him till his last breath. In fact, she tells Asuna that the bomb was for her protection. When Aincrad was over, she could tell the police that he threatened her into helping him and thereby escape legal punishment.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • He may have caused the deaths of 4000+ players just to bring his imagination to life, but he keeps his own rules even if it meant losing everything. By these standards he holds Nobuyuki Sugou, who exploited his Game Master status for all it was worth, in contempt and helps out Kirito in taking him down.
  • On a minor note, he's above hurting children as the Nerve Gears that he created disallowed people under 13 to use it. Though seeing as some people under that age, such as Silica, played the game anyway, he didn't seem to put much effort into preventing them from playing, likely since taking more active measures could have risked his plot coming to light before he could initiate it.
  • He appears to draw the line at sexual assault. In SAO, a victim of such is immediately presented with an option to teleport the offender to Black Iron Prison. This is due to the Ethics Code he programmed and, unlike the therapist AIs, it was allowed to continue functioning properly during the death game. His virtual ghost also steps in to help Kirito against Sugou after Sugou molests Asuna.
  • In Ordinal Scale, he disagrees with Tetsuhiro Shigemura's Evil Plan, but that was because he thought it wasn't visionary enough rather than any moral objection.
• Game Master: He's the administrator of SAO.
• A God Am I: While he never claims to be anything more than a programmer, Kirito notes that his behavior is godlike - looking upon the players not with empathy, but with mercy and pity. This is what allows Kirito to identify him as Heathcliff.
• Greater-Scope Villain: As the gamemaster, he's more dangerous than villains like Laughing Coffin but otherwise uninvolved with their evil plans. His actions would also lead to the later Arc Villains Sugou, Death Gun, and even The Movie villain in fulfilling their own evil plans.
• Heel–Face Turn: Once SAO is cleared, Kayaba's Virtual Ghost becomes an ally of sorts and no longer antagonizes Kirito, even helping him out a few times against the new Big Bads.
• Karma Houdini: He dies on his own terms. While Kirito isn't openly hostile or hateful, he doesn't think that he can ever forgive Kayaba for those deaths, particularly Sachi's.
• Killer Game Master: He designed the Nerve Gear to kill players in real-life if they died in his game. He also placed lots of traps in his world with the idea of making that happen.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: He's no saint by any means, but Kayaba is a Fair-Play Villain with his own morals who sticks to his rules, which makes him this to the likes of Nobuyuki Sugou, a sociopathic Corrupt Corporate Executive who stole and used Kayaba's technology to perform inhumane Mind Control experiments on innocent people, the members of Laughing Coffin, who killed other players For the Evulz because they knew Kayaba would get the blame and they'd get off scot-free, Quinella, a Dark Messiah and Control Freak who took over the Underworld for herself, and Gabriel Miller, a megalomaniacal and psychopathic PMC commander with a twisted fixation on stealing souls.
• Lying Creator: In-Universe example: On the first day of SAO, he states that there is no way to revive someone who has been killed in the game (and that anyone whose HP had hit 0 would be brain-fried in the real world). However, Kirito later learns of a revive crystal that can revive someone up to 10 seconds after in-game death. So, it seems that there is a way to revive someone; it just isn't very likely to work.
• Mad Artist: He dreamed of a masterpiece of a world where players can surpass the limits of reality. He also dreamed of people fighting for their lives in said world, apparently.
• Motive Decay: As Aincrad crumbles, he discusses this trope with Asuna and Kirito in combination with a Motive Rant encapsulating his original desire. "Why you ask? For a long time, even I had forgotten. Why did I do this?" He concludes with a statement that suggests this Aincrad did not measure up to the ideal Aincrad he envisioned.
• Motive Rant: As Aincrad crumbles, he tells Kirito and Asuna why he created the death game. In a nutshell, he had a dream about a floating castle civilization and he wanted to manifest that dream in reality. It was this passion that drove him to create ground-breaking virtual reality technology. While he's satisfied with the outcome of SAO, the floating castle itself falls short of his ideal.
• Noble Demon: He's a murderer and a kidnapper and has some weird ethics to be sure but he sticks to his rules and is a Graceful Loser.
• Psychopathic Manchild: His ultimate goal is essentially to bring the world of his imagination to life and have it be as real as possible. He also possesses a certain sense of fair play. This is Lampshaded in the 4-koma, where the raid team accuses him of having 8th grader syndrome.
• The Sociopath: Just doesn't care either way about the people trapped in his death game. Sure, he does help found and raise a very powerful guild and helps its members develop, but that was done solely to have strong players who would keep challenging the game. That said, he's a surprisingly realistic example in that he does none of this with any malice in mind; he built the game not because he enjoyed watching thousands die but because he wanted to make and build a world and it wouldn't have been real if real people didn't populate, live, and die in it. In addition, he always meant for the game to end with his death, and when discovered early he willingly forgoed his admin privileges to fight on Kirito's level in a one-on-one duel and kept his word once he was beaten to let everyone go.
• Sorry That I'm Dying: He apologizes to Rinko in the Alicization arc for leaving her behind. Case in point, Kirito beats him back in Aincrad.
• Straw Nihilist: He doesn't even care about his own life.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: His anime character design is an average-looking man in a lab coat, in contrast to his Heathcliff avatar. Yet, he's still the Big Bad of the Aincrad arc.
• The Unfettered: The game will continue for Kayaba's amusement. What the players think of him is irrelevant.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: His ultimate goal is to reach or create "Aincrad", the world that surpasses the limits of reality that he saw in his dreams. The "Aincrad" from SAO is based on it.
• Villainous Legacy: A subversion, in that while Kayaba's influence does loom large over the series long after his role is ended, the impacts are largely beneficial to society:
  • A virtual remnant of himself is what allows Kirito to turn the tables on Oberon at the climax of Fairy Dance.
  • The World Seed he created with data gathered from the Aincrad server is ultimately what allows VRMMOs to continue to exist after SAO and the first ALO server are shut down. The same thing happens in the video game continuity at the end of Hollow Realization, when his virtual self is recreated as part of the Cardinal System's preparation to test Aincrad's destruction (as his death is crucial to make it happen). Thankfully, he deactivates the destruction module after Tia is defeated.
  • At the end of Mother's Rosario, it's revealed that he was the original designer of the Medicuboid system that made it possible for Yuuki to have a high quality of life in VR while her health rapidly deteriorated due to AIDS.
  • He shows up again (in a robot body) near the end of Alicization just in time to screw up the GDS' last-ditch bombing of Ocean Turtle.
• Virtual Ghost: What he becomes after the events of the Aincrad arc, which is why he also avoids being sent to prison (since his physical body was dead). All of his subsequent appearances have him manifesting in this form. In the main continuity, he used a special machine to preserve his life, while in the game continuity (Hollow Realization) the Cardinal System brought him back to life in order to serve as the restored Aincrad's Final Boss (as his death is necessary to destroy Aincrad and complete the test), but with the deactivation of the module he just runs off to do his own thing. In Ordinal Scale, he manifests through Augmented Reality to have a chat with his former teacher, that movie's Big Bad.
• Visionary Villain: His dream of "Aincrad" led him to villainy.

Tropes specific to Heathcliff

• Adaptational Early Appearance: In canon, Heathcliff and the "Knights of the Blood Oath" don't really show up until around Floor 50. In Integral Factor, Heathcliff first debuts on Floor 11 where he pulls a Big Damn Heroes in the fight against the floor boss, while he debuts proper and in person on Floor 12 introducing his guild at the same time.
• Armored Villains, Unarmored Heroes: As Heathcliff he is clad in the armor of the Knights of the Blood Oath, while Kirito wears a simple Badass Longcoat.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: As the creator of the game, he has an intimate understanding of how the various Sword Arts work. Near the end of his second duel with Kirito, he's thus able to see through and defend against his opponent's system-assisted combo, and then attacks him while he's vulnerable, simply.
• Beneath the Mask: After their duel, where he was forced to use his admin powers to slow down time due to Kirito landing a blow on him, he drops his former jolly attitude and glares at Kirito fiercely before turning his back away.
• Brought Down to Badass: He voluntarily strips himself of his Game Master status and admin privileges to fight Kirito on an even footing. Even without them, he's able to hold his own and nearly win.
• The Cameo: He makes two of these in the Progressive Manga, the first as Argo's informant on the Legend Braves and later at a Clearers meeting after Lind and Kibaou create their respective guilds, with him showing intrigue at the idea of a "Third Guild" after the concern of Kirito starting one comes up.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: He's a man who created all the Sword Skills, thus in the final fight with him, any Sword Skills are useless on him, as he can predict and block each one of them, leaving his opponent open to counterattacks.
• Crutch Character: Heathcliff is something of a meta-example of this trope; he's the ultimate tank who fights on the front lines with his men, and created the strongest guild specifically to collect the game's biggest badasses. He also intended to betray the players on the 95th floor to set himself up as the Final Boss.
• Disc-One Final Boss: In Infinty Moment/Hollow Fragment, he's the final challenge Kirito faces before clearing the game. Downplayed since the player doesn't fight him (unless you're playing the original Infinty Moment, where the boss served as a tutorial), and he's technically the first boss as the game glosses over the first 75 floors. After the MHCP glitch teleports him away, Suguo/Alberich usurps his role as Big Bad, though he returns later as the True Final Boss.
• Distinctive Appearance: Unlike other members of the "Knights of Blood", his uniform is primarily red with white trimmings as opposed to white with red.
• Duel Boss:
  • He intended to be this and the Final Boss for Kirito, but Asuna ended up interfering in order to save Kirito.
  • In Infinity Moment/Hollow Fragment, he averts this because Kirito is allowed to have one ally. This is more apparent in season 1 of the anime adaptation.
• Establishing Character Moment: In Integral Factor he has two of these, he's first shown as a mysterious player who intervenes in the Floor 11 boss fight and saves the Player's life. He then reappears on Floor 12 where he blocks several player killers from attacking Leafa and knocking them back with a simple sword skill.
• Famed In-Story: He is well-known as the most powerful player in game, the leader of the strongest guild in the game, a wielder of an Unique Skill (Holy Sword), and is considered Aincrad's greatest hero all before his reveal as Kayaba, spawning many Red Baron titles as mentioned below.
• Final Boss: He was supposed to be this for SAO, but ends up being discovered at floor 75. In Infinity Moment/Hollow Fragment, he gets to properly fulfil his role on the final floor.
• Final-Exam Boss: Inverted. Outside of his Unique Skill and giving himself the appropriate stats, the biggest threat Heathcliff poses as a boss is that, as the one who made the Sword Skill System, he knows and has mastery over all of them. This not only makes him a very skilled warrior, but it also means he can predict and counter every Sword Skill anyone could try and use against him, evens one belonging to other Unique Skills. Kirito realises this and tries to avoid activating any against him, only to end up activating one out of habit as the battle gets more heated.
• Mysterious Past: Heathcliff himself is apparently a total mystery among the frontlines, to the point that Argo admits to knowing next to nothing about him.
• The GM Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • To protect his guise as Heathcliff in his duel with Kirito, he accelerated faster than the normal players in SAO to block damage. He also has the "Immortal Object" ability normally granted to environmental objects to protect his life if his HP goes below 50%.
  • In the second duel Kirito noted that Kayaba did not, in fact, need the additional assistance to strike that fast.
• GMPC: Considered to be the strongest player in SAO. The Leader of the most powerful guild. One of the only two known people with a Unique Skill. Have never been seen being brought down to below 50% HP. Respected by all. Granted he expected himself to be revealed at around the 95th floor and deliberately did this to bring forth the greatest despair to the players. On the other hand, he tends to not do much and fights passively, letting the rest of the players do their own thing and to figure out what to do on their own. He even let his Number Two do most of the actual leading of the guild he made. It was the combination of all the above that led Kirito, plus the fact that "there's nothing more boring than watching someone else play an RPG.", to figure his true identity.
• I Have Many Names: His Red Baron titles include "The Living Legend," "The Strongest Man," and "The Paladin."
• Knightly Sword and Shield: To fit with his, and his guild’s, heavy Knight in Shining Armor motif, he wields a sword and tower shield set called “Liberator”. Given that his Unique Skill gives him the ability to Shield Bash, this gives him all the more reason to do this.
• Kung-Fu Clairvoyance: His role as the creator of the game and its Sword Skills make him able to anticipate the majority of his opponent's attacks in his fight, particularly said Sword Skills.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Has sharp, defined features that includes his jawline to fit his knightly, heroic look as Heathcliff when the "Justice" part is actually far from the truth.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: While his first duel with Kirito was rigged due to his GM abilities, in his second duel he turns off his Complete Immortality and fights Kirito fairly.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: As Heathcliff he's the light to Kirito's dark. Kirito is known as the "Black Swordsman" and invokes Dark Is Not Evil, while Heathcliff is a paladin with his attacks including the "Holy Sword" and "Spiritual Light" and revealed to be Light Is Not Good.
• Light Is Good: His title is "The Paladin" and his skills are Holy Sword and Spiritual Light. Unfortunately, he is also Kayaba.
• Light Is Not Good: Heathcliff has light-based skills and is a Paladin. And he turns out to be Akihiko Kayaba, the man responsible for trapping ten thousand people in his death game.
• Master Swordsman: Kirito notes that he is intimately familiar with the dueling system and so his skill level is above even his own. This is of course because he created the dueling system.
• Meaningful Name: Kayaba naming his character after the villain of Wuthering Heights draws certain parallels — originally appearing heroic, he is revealed to have more evil and self-serving intents.
• Non-Indicative Name: His Holy Sword unique skill boosts his attack and defense and lets him Shield Bash.
• The Paladin: His title and his light based skills invoked the trope.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: He is the leader of the "Knights of Blood."
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Heathcliff has red armor with black cloths underneath and turns out to be the Big Bad Akihiko Kayaba.
• Red Is Heroic: He is the only one in Red Armor. Inverted in that he is the Big Bad. Therefore, Red and Black and Evil All Over is more appropriate.
• Shield Bash: Kirito undergoes so many levels of Oh, Crap! when he gets the receiving end of his Holy Sword during their first duel.
• Slasher Smile: Gives off a vicious one during his Final Battle with Kirito, after Kirito blunders by accidentally activating a Sword Skill, to which Heathcliff knows he's won the fight.
• Stonewall: As mentioned above, he's an incredible, seemingly invincible tank player. As also mentioned, this is justified because he used his GM powers to give himself god mode.
• Strong and Skilled: Having designed the entire game, including the Sword Skill system, Kayaba is very knowledgeable in sword combat, and quite possibly that of the other weapons in SAO, and is capable of using a sword and great shield with a good deal of skill.. Combine that with the Heathcliff account's high stats, Unique Skill, and and ability to make himself Nigh-Invulnerable, and you've got someone truly worthy of being the Final Boss. Even after voluntarily turning off his admin privileges and leveling the playing field, he's still able to hold his own against Kirito and would have beaten him if it wasn't for a combination of blind luck and The Power of Love.
• True Final Boss: In Infinity Moment/Hollow Fragment. Alberich/Sugou may have usurped his planned role as the true villain of Aincrad, but Kayaba will only let the game truly end by finishing his final duel with Kirito.
• Villain with Good Publicity: As Heathcliff, he is a famous hero.
• Walking Spoiler: The true identity of Heathcliff turns out to be none other than Akihiko Kayaba.
• World's Strongest Man: He is considered as the game's most powerful swordsman, thanks to his incredible reflexes, his impossible speed, his truly invulnerable shield, and his incredible sword. "The Strongest Man" is also one of his titles. Kirito is the only one who can contest him in this status.

Laughing Coffin

See the Sword Art Online - Laughing Coffin page.

RECT Inc.

Nobuyuki Sugou / Oberon the Fairy King

See the Sword Art Online - Nobuyuki Sugou page.

Scientist (SPOILERS)

Yanai

Voiced by: Yusuke Numata (Japanese), Chris Cason (English), Elliot Leguizamo (Latin American Spanish)

^{Click here to see his real appearance}

One of two scientists working for Sugou is his brainwashing and mind altering experiments. ^{Click here to see spoilers}Later revealed to be Yanai, a double agent Sugou planted in Rath who took up work at the Ocean Turtle after Sugou's arrest.

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• Abhorrent Admirer: Of Asuna, expressing envy that Nobuyuki Sugou gets her all to himself and attempting to sexually harass her. He also later becomes one to Quinella, who manipulates him to create the "Seal of the Right Eye" to keep the residents of the Underworld obedient to her Taboo Index.
• Adaptational Dye-Job: His slug form is gray in the light novel, but purple in the anime.
• Apologetic Attacker: Apologises to Higa for shooting him, claiming he didn’t mean to hit him.
• Ascended Extra: He only appears in one scene in the Fairy Dance arc, yet later appears as his real self as an obstacle to reviving Kirito.
• Avenging the Villain: He intially claims he wants to avenge Sugou. He also tries to prevent Kirito from being saved, due to being bitter over the boy being responsible for Quinella's death.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: He and his fellow researcher take on the form of slug monsters with multiple tentacle appendages. Unlike his partner though, who appears to mainly see their extra arms as more effective tools for their work, he's quick to use the appendages as Naughty Tentacles to harass Asuna when they find her sneaking out.
• Dirty Coward: He escapes punishment for his role in Sugou's crimes by throwing his coworker under the bus. During the confrontation with Higa, Yanai is the one who's visibly terrified, even though he has a gun and Higa is unarmed.
• Disney Villain Death: A falling wrench causes him to fall to his death.
• Drugs Are Bad: His encounter with Asuna implies that he's a user of digital drugs, drugs usable via a VR device that create stimulation in brain activity with varying effects.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He's heavily Implied to be one of the four scientists who raised the original Fluctlights and imparted self-serving ideals onto them. This makes him responsible for quite possibly every horrible Noble encountered in the Underworld, like Raios and Humbert, Quinella, and Cruiga.
• Hypocrite: He initially claims to be avenging Sugou in trying to prevent Kirito's revival, though he's Implied the guy who sold him out to begin with.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After receiving no comeuppance for him harassing Asuna in Fairy Dance, he finally got his comeuppance when he fell to his death.
• Lack of Empathy: For starters, he shows no regard to any of Sugou's test subjects while experimenting on them.
• Meaningful Name: His surname has the characters for 8, 7 and 1 in that order. It means he's the source of the program that prevents the Fluctlights from violating the Taboo Index in the Human Empire. Ditto with the "Rule of the Strongest" in the Dark Territory. This proves he was Quinella's ally from the real world.
• The Mole: He's the spy in Rath, as well as one of Sugou's subordinates.
• Revenge Before Reason: He probably would have got out alive if he had simply done the following: stayed put, kept his head down, and let Kirito be revived and Alice be extracted by Rath. However, his anger at Kirito for killing Quinella compels him to go with Higa so he can prevent him from reviving Kirito and revealing himself as The Mole. This puts him in a position to be killed by the mercenaries, who are likely to do so to cover up US involvement. It also leads to his death after Rinko figures him out from the lab coat he left behind, heads to their position, and drops a wrench on him. This causes him to fall to his death.
• Sadist: He clearly enjoys experimenting on Sugou's test subjects.
• Sanity Slippage: While pretty messed up in Fairy Dance, he is a lot more unstable when he returns in Alicization. It's especially after Quinella dies.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Ohhh boy. He was the spy implanted within Rath. He was the one who probably raised the original generation of Fluctlights who grew into corrupt nobles. He revealed the real world to Quinella. Also, he created the "CODE: 871" a.k.a. the "Seal of the Right Eye" that keeps the Underworld citizens complacent. This makes him responsible for nearly everything Kirito had to go through during the first half of Alicization, and the suffering of other characters (like Eugeo).
• Undignified Death: Among all the deaths presented in this series, none are as embarrassing as falling to one’s death after getting startled by a falling wrench.
• Villainous Crush: If him sexually harassing Asuna is anything go by. He also gets envious of Sugou having her all to himself and him attempting to sexually assault her.
• Walking Spoiler: Since he's mostly a background character, it's impossible to discuss him without revealing that he's the spy inside the Ocean Turtle.

Death Gun

"Death Gun" / Sterben

"Death Gun" / Sterben

Voiced by: Soichiro Hoshi (Japanese), Ben Diskin (English), Rafael Ordóñez Arrieta (European Spanish), Alfredo Gabriel Basurto (Latin American Spanish)

"Let your fear carve one name into your brains, the name I share with this weapon: Death Gun!"

A mysterious gunman who showed up in Gun Gale Online, rumored to be able to kill someone in real-life from the virtual world. The antagonist of volumes 5-6.

^{Click here to see spoilers}Death Gun's true identity is not one but three separate individuals. Former Laughing Coffin member XaXa / Shouichi Shinkawa, his younger brother Kyouji Shinkawa, and later another Laughing Coffin member Johnny Black / Atsushi Kanamoto. The group operated by having one of them use the Death Gun / Sterben avatar to kill someone in-game, while the other members would be beside the victim in real life and inject them with a poison to stop their heart.

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• Arch-Enemy:
  • To Kirito. XaXa had a very personal conflict with Kirito for besting him back in SAO and deeming him too unimportant to find out his name. "Death Gun" is delighted at having another chance to even the score with Kirito, taking delight in the fact that Kirito can't remember his name, and that Kirito is now a shadow of his former self by mockingly referring to him as "Black Swordsman". While on Kirito's side, discovering "Death Gun" was an SAO survivor who he had history with opened a lot of emotional wounds that he had tried to shut out, including the guilt he carried over taking human lives. Kirito becomes hellbent on finding out the identity of Death Gun and putting a stop to him before he can take anymore lives. The fact that they are both SAO survivors who can't let go of their past, just makes Kirito all the more determined to prove he is better.
  • To Sinon. The Kyouji side of him was a Stalker with a Crush for Sinon and created the Death Gun myth through inspiration of the incident that traumatized Sinon, using the same gun she used to kill the bank robber. Sinon is one of Death Gun's key targets, while Sinon herself is determined to prove she isn't weak by overcoming him. It's even more prevalent in Fatal Bullet where Sinon actually has a score to settle with Death Gun, personally entering BoB in a bid to take Death Gun down and prevent the same gun from taking any more lives.
• Arc Villain: Of the Phantom Bullet arc, with his mysterious murders driving the plot and leading Kirito being called in to investigate him, while also serving as the main threat throughout the arc as he threatens the lives of Sinon and other BoB players.
• Ax-Crazy: Downplayed. He enjoys killing just as much as any other Laughing Coffin member, but for the most he demonstrates a lot of restraint and a calm collected attitude.
• Badass Boast: After killing XeXeeD, he introduces himself to the players of GGO.
  Death Gun: This is real power, real strength! Let your fear carve one name into your brains, the name I share with this weapon: Death Gun!
• Badass Cape: Dons a tattered mantle that comes with a hood, which, in addition to the skull-like helmet, gives him a sinister vibe, akin to a Grim Reaper.
• Badass Normal: Unlike other villains who were seriously overpowered, Death Gun is simply extremely skilled and very strategic. Yet, he manages to be a serious threat all on his own.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Three people are playing the role. One plays, while the other two break into the homes of either well-known, or powerful players and administers the lethal injections.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Borrows PoH's "It's showtime" as part of a Red Herring to his real identity in order to throw Kirito off.
• Card-Carrying Villain: He is proud of the fact he is a true red-player, one who kills for the satisfaction and not for survival like Kirito did.
• Cast as a Mask: To hide the fact that Kyouji was one of the members of Death Gun, while he's in-game he has a completely different voice actor.
• Catchphrase: "The name I share with this weapon: Death Gun!"
• Characterization Marches On: When we first meet Death Gun, he comes off as rather loud and passionate, giving a "Reason You Suck" Speech calling XeXeeD a fraud with false strength before killing him and intimidating the scared bar patrons, which makes his calmer demeanour when he encounters Kirito and during the BoB after he kills Pale Rider and nearly kills Sinon rather odd. This is because there are multiple players using the Avatar, with Kyouji being the one to use the Death Gun on XeXeeD, who he resented as the one who instigated the AGI scam, whereas after we only see it used by his brother XaXa, who's not only an older and more experienced Serial Killer, but also has no personal resentment towards Death Gun's victims, solely killing them For the Evulz.
• Cold Ham: He doesn't shy away from Badass Boasts and reminding Kirito of how he holds all the aces, but due to the Creepy Monotone from his Cool Mask he never raises his voice while hamming it up.
• Cold Sniper: He uses a L115A3, the British Army designation for the Arctic Warfare Super Magnum sniper rifle. The gun's unique custom integrally suppressed barrel is what gives it its unique "Silent Assassin" moniker. During the BoB tournament, he usually uses it to shoot his targets with stun bullets, but he can also load more standard bullets which he uses against Kirito and Sinon.
• Collective Identity: There were three perpetrators. Two were Siblings in Crime while the other was added later for their plot during the third Bullet of Bullets. Specifically, Kyouji Shinkawa/Spiegel created "Sterben", and bought the Optic Camo-cloak from a Real Money Trade, and a replacement for his Spiegel avatar, as it was poorly optimized due to XeXeeD's false information.. His older brother Shouichi/"Red-Eyed" XaXa, normally spied on players entering their real-world info in game at the Governors Palace using the Optic Camo Cloak to stay hidden, and administered the poisons on the first two victims, while Kyouji performed the choreographed act of shooting the victims in-game. Johnny Black joined in the crime to murder Garrett and Pale Rider, and Kyouji and XaXa switched roles for the Bullet of Bullets Tournament.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: In contrast with the previous two, Death Gun is not a GMPC and used a code name different to his character name. His goals are also very different, whereas Kayaba was a Visionary Villain who wanted to make a Virtual World real, and Sugou wanted to rule a Virtual World as its God and have Asuna for himself, Death Gun's goal is merely to kill in cold blood and pass judgment on what he considers to be false strength. Thematically he averts the Light Is Not Good motif seen with Heathcliff and Oberon, instead embodying Dark Is Evil to contrast Kirito's Dark Is Not Evil. Finally, Death Gun is the first Big Bad who is roughly on even ground with Kirito in fighting ability, by virtue that he's not a GM with broken admin privileges, as his power comes from skill with a sword, though of course that doesn't matter since the goal isn't to overpower Death Gun, but to find out his identity and stop him from killing Sinon.
• Contrived Coincidence: His "Death Gun" is the same exact model of gun Shino used to kill a bank robber years ago. She herself is stunned to see this. Subverted later; it's not a coincidence. Death Gun's creator, Kyouji Shinkawa picked it specifically, as a "tribute" to Shino's "True Power". For Shino, it triggers her PTSD.
• Cool Mask: Wears one that resembles a mechanical skull whose eyes are glowing red, and vents out steam for extra creepy factor. It's design Foreshadows his true identity as XaXa.
• Cool Sword: An estoc crafted from the armor plating of a starship.
• Crazy-Prepared: He has decked himself out with lots of high level equipment to account for different scenarios, such as his Invisibility Cloak, his paralysis bullet, his hand crafted estoc, and of course the muscle relaxant poison he uses to carry out his kills.
• Creepy Monotone: Due to his mask filtering out his voice, it appears almost completely drained of emotion. His icy tone gives a haunting quality to all his lines promising to kill someone.
• Dark Is Evil: Clad in black clothes and sneaks about in the shadows.
• Death by Irony: Death Gun's entire shtick is being able to fire a "Phantom Bullet" in-game that will kill players in real-life. Ultimately what is used to defeat him is a Phantom Bullet created by Sinon (one of his targets), using her sniper rifle's prediction line which distracts Death Gun for long enough and allow Kirito to finish him off.
• Decoy Antagonist: In Fatal Bullet, promotional advertising made it look like Death Gun would be the Big Bad of the game with him even headlining the opening sequence. In reality he is the secondary villain part of a Big Bad Ensemble, only taking center stage during "Kirito Mode" which is the direct Phantom Bullet adaptation, which while important to the plot is ultimately not the main focus of the game.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • To Kirito, for the XaXa side of him. Both of them are SAO survivors who ended up in GGO and both of them wear dark colors. Both of them are Master Swordsman and are still using swords despite being in a gun MMO, symbolic of how both are living in the past that is SAO. However, while Kirito tried shutting the traumatic past out, "Death Gun" embraced it and took pride in being a red player.
  • To Sinon, with both being Cold Snipers and both work in groups to engage in Player Killing. However otherwise they are polar opposites, with Sinon noting her PK Squadron have a degree of honor in fighting on the battlefield, while Death Gun's methods are nothing but cowardly murder. In addition, the Kyouji side to him parallels Sinon in that both of them immersed themselves in Gun Gale Online out of a dissatisfaction in real life and seeking to grow stronger there. The contrast is that Sinon's goal was to use her time spent in GGO to improve her real life self in accordance, while Kyouji outright rejected reality and chose the virtual world as his new existence while his obsession with Sinon is Loving a Shadow.
  • Despite her never interacting with them personally, the Kyouji side can also be seen as one to Asuna. Both are the second children of wealthy families who were pressured by their parents into becoming top students, which is shown to have negatively impacted the both of them, and both rocked Fragile Speedster stat builds in the Virtual World. But whereas Asuna did manage to become top of her class and entered SAO having no experience with video games, Kyouji was unable to live up to his parents' expectations and turned to gaming for stress relief. Both are hinted to have The Gift, but whereas Asuna was fortunate enough to meet and befriend experienced players who mentored her into the strong warrior she is now, Kyouji's chance of in-game success was foiled due to being among those duped by an experienced but ultimately self-serving player.
• Evil Is Bigger: While this is largely due to Kirito's GGO avatar being shorter, Death Gun typically towers over both him and Sinon.
• Evil Is Hammy: Whenever he invokes his presence, he ensures that his ham invokes fear in his opponents.
• Evil Laugh: Has a very creepy sinister chuckle which has a reverb effect.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Sports a deep, sinister, mechanical voice. Especially true with Ben Diskin, where he's known to pull deep voices at times for some of his older characters.
• Expy: A very obvious one to Darth Vader. Clad in dark clothes, namely a Badass Cape (complete with a hood) and a Cool Mask, "Death Gun" sports a Vader Breath as well as a Creepy Monotone voice, and is related to Kirito by way of having faced him before in Aincrad as part of the Laughing Coffin guild. The fact he faces a boy wielding a Laser Blade drives the Star Wars homage even further.
• Fair-Play Villain: Kirito believed Death Gun to be this, stating he had his own rules that he followed and he wouldn't try to kill any of his victims in real-life once it was made impossible in-game. This may be true for XaXa, but Kyouji had no problem with killing Sinon even after Death Gun's defeat.
• Faux Affably Evil: He has nothing but respect and praise for the old Kirito of SAO. Though he seems disgusted by how weak the present day Kirito of GGO has become.
• Forced to Watch: His Evil Plan is to incapacitate Kirito in battle and then force him to watch as he kills Sinon both in-game and in real-life.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The opening shows three shadows around Kirito, indicating there are three people in total behind his identity. Also, a shot of Kyouji with his hand outstretched gets replaced with Death Gun.
  • Death Gun wears a skull mask and uses an Estoc, much like XaXa did back in SAO.
  • His tournament name, Sterben, means "to die" in German. It is also a medical term used to pronounce the death of a patient in a hospital. His method of killing involves his victim being injected with a lethal dose of drug in the real world the same time they were shot by him in GGO. This indicates that "Death Gun" might be a doctor or someone with knowledge in the field of medicine. Similarly, Spiegel's name is also German, being the word for "Mirror," implying a connection between the two.
• For the Evulz: One of the reasons "Death Gun" kills. Two of the conspirators were members of Laughing Coffin and wanted to continue the death game that was SAO.
• Four Is Death: In the end, he kills a total of four players.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Much like Oberon before him, Kirito slices Death Gun in half at the end of their duel.
• Handguns: Uses a Type 54 "Black Star"^note Chinese knock-off of the Soviet Tokarev TT-33. The Black Star refers to the stamping mark on the gripin GGO.
• Head Bob: As his face is always obscured by his skull mask, his head bobs and tilts about with his speech to convey his emotion. In the climax, Sinon puts a prediction line on him, where he shows his surprise by flinching and his head turning to look down.
• Hijacked by Ganon: He's a new villain who turns out to be an avatar for Shouichi Shinkawa, aka XaXa of Laughing Coffin..
• Image Song: One, MAD BULLET"S".
• Invisibility Cloak: He owns a mantle that has the "Metamaterial Optical Camouflage" ability. He can use it in the city AREA and hide from satellite scans during BoB.
• I Know Your True Name: Is on both the giving end, and the receiving end of this. He notices Kirito's name in the Qualifiers and demands to know if he's the same one from SAO, or a fake using his name. Part of the plot during the actual tournament itself is when Kirito realizes that Death Gun's character is not actually named Death Gun, forcing him to figure out what his real character name is. It's also an important plot point, when Kirito figures out it's a member of Laughing Coffin, and tries to recall who he is, as so the criminal can then be arrested. He pieces together the clues via Death Gun's mask, melee weapon, and fighting style, identifying him as Red-Eyed XaXa on International internet streams watching the events of the tournament, shocking XaXa and breaking his concentration.
• Implacable Man: He never stops or slows down his hunt for Kirito and Sinon.
• Improvised Weapon: Uses a crudely-made Estoc.
• Knight of Cerebus: While he's not the first Sword Art Online villain to be a complete creep with no redeeming qualities, unlike his predecessors he invokes fear in the characters and audience alike. He's also a constant threat that Kirito must fight against and escape from, rather than a villain who waits around to be found. Season 2 is a great deal more Darker and Edgier because of him.
• Leitmotif: Has an ominous theme that accompanies his presence.
• Machine Monotone: In the English dub, Death Gun speaks in a mechanically-distorted Creepy Monotone. In the Japanese Dub, when Kirito engages him in a final duel, his voice changes from the deep-sounding adult male voice, into one sounding late teen/young adult male voice, further revealing his true identity. Specifically, its XaXa's voice, just being filtered due to the mask, and using a voice changing filter to disguise his identity beforehand.
• Mood-Swinger: At the start of the arc, Death Gun goes on a rant to the TV screen of XeXeeD about high level players being cheaters but is more calm and sinister in the Bullet of Bullets tournament. Of course, it turns out to be foreshadowing to him being a Collective Identity.
• Moral Myopia: He believes weakness is a crime. He passes judgement on a player's strength and if he deems them to be too weak or having false strength, then they must die. On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to think of having his brother and old partner poison people on his behalf, while they’re helpless no less, as "false strength".
• The Musketeer: His signature weapons are his eponymous "Death Gun", and a crudely built estoc made from warship armor plating, neither of which he uses at the same time, only using the latter against Kirito. Justified since the pistol can only be used on players who his IRL accomplices can enter the homes of and poison, meaning that using it on anyone who doesn't meet these requirements and therefore wouldn't be killed would break the illusion.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: As if his moniker as the "Death Gun" wasn't representative enough of the murders he started committing in GGO, his BoB tournament entry name, "Sterben", is the German verb for "To die".
• Nonindicative Name: His estoc is officially considered a knife in Gun Gale Online, even though it's clearly long enough to be classified as a sword.
• Nothing Is Scarier: We know so little about him when he's introduced. Who is he? How does he kill players in real-life? How does he remain undetected throughout the game? When these answers slowly get revealed he becomes less threatening.
• Oh, Crap!: He's got Kirito on the ropes with an improvised estoc... then Kirito realizes he's Red-Eyed XaXa, and the Prediction Line from Sinon's Hecate appears on his center mass. His mask stops us from seeing his expression, but he promptly triggers his cloak's Metamaterial Optical Camouflage, so it's safe to assume this trope.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: "Death Gun" is the moniker he goes by and announces to the game. This is part of his cover, as player names are not displayed except as part of Satellite Scans, tournament standings, and when one has formed a Squad with others, as part of their HUD. His character name is actually "Sterben".
• Precision F-Strike: The otherwise collected and impersonal Death Gun calls Kirito's initial attack on him "half-assed" in the English dub.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: His helm features red eyes that glow and sometimes flash, Foreshadowing his true identity as Red-Eyed XaXa.
• Red Herring: Although he reveals himself as being a Laughing Coffin member, he starts throwing multiple false clues common of other LC members. One of which is saying PoH's trademark line of "It's show time."
• Revenge: Another reason why "Death Gun" kills. Two of the perpetrators are former Laughing Coffin members, and they are elated when they get the chance to torment Kirito in Gun Gale Online. The third blamed the high level players for recommending a character build that eventually got nerfed, leaving him unable to compete in the BoB tournament for his subscription fee.
• Rich Kids: Shouichi/XaXa paid a lot of money to kit out Sterben with the sniper rifle and optic camo cloak via the Real Money Trade system in GGO. The cloak alone has an estimated value of 300,000 Yen^note $2504.07 U.S. Dollars as of May 2015, and rare sniper rifles go for quite a lot. Shouichi is said to have a monthly allowance, of 500,000 yen, and the Shinkawa brothers parents are doctors.
• Serial Killer: The Gun Gale Online arc has Kirito investigate on this enigmatic character who is rumored to be able to kill players both in the game and in the real world. Two known victims were among GGO's top players.
• Siblings in Crime: The original two members of the team. The eldest was a former SAO player who was part of the red guild "Laughing Coffin"; he was the one who collected info on where their targets lived, was the one who injected XeXeeD and Usujio Tarako with Succinycholine in the real world, and is the one who shot the avatars of Pale Rider and Garret in GGO during BoB. The youngest was the one who shot the avatars of XeXeeD and Usujio Tarako in GGO, and during BoB he was meant to break into Shino's home and inject her with a dose of Succinylcholine with a needless syringe. Both were children of a doctor and had access to the funds and equipment needed to pull it off.
• Simple, yet Awesome: During his final duel with Kirito, he uses a player-made Estoc. Because of the limitations of GGO's Gun/Sword Creation skill, his weapon is statistically weaker than Kirito's; however, it's much better suited to XaXa's fighting style than a Photon Sword is to Kirito's, giving him an edge.
• Sinister Shiv: His estoc is essentially this, being a strip of starship metal that he fashioned into a sword (or, according to Gun Gale Online, a long dagger).
• Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: Death Gun actually averts this in terms of threat level, being far less powerful than his predecessors since he's not a GM with admin privileges. In battle he's mostly evenly matched with Kirito, with his power coming from his skill and the equipment that he bought. However he makes up what he lacks in raw power by being genuinely terrifying compared to his predecessors, and has the edge in that the heroes don't know how he operates so still making him quite efficient.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Death Gun, being a Cold Ham, speaks in an even monotone.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: By virtue of having an Invisibility Cloak, he can quickly appear and disappear at will.
• Strong and Skilled: Like Kirito he has the swordsmanship skills from his times in SAO, but overall he's equipped with much better gear due to Shouichi paying an extensive amount of money to fit him with the best, as well as making a crudely-built estoc, which is much more suited to his style than Kirito's Photon Sword.
• Tattooed Crook: Amidst the bandages on his right arm, a small tattoo can be made out. It's the same mark as the members of Laughing Coffin, and Kirito subsequently has a Heroic BSoD when he sees it.
• Tom the Dark Lord: Subverted. Due to a lack of fluency in English, Sinon and Kirito initially assume that his username is pronounced "Steven", which is a fairly average English name. However, it's later revealed that it's pronounced "Sterben", which is a German phrase used in Hospitals meaning "to die".
• Troll: For a large portion of the arc, Death Gun would taunt Kirito on not being able to remember his name, guilting Kirito into thinking he had forgotten. In reality Kirito didn't forget at all, it was just that Death Gun never directly told his real name. However, Kirito was indirectly told his name during a briefing and is able to finally remember Death Gun's name as "Red-Eyed XaXa" from his red eyes.
• Vader Breath: When talking, a distinctive wheeze can be sporadically heard around "Death Gun". In fact he sometimes blows out steam from his visor.
• Walking Spoiler: The character known as "Death Gun" is actually an entity created by three people, two of which are SAO survivors of the Player Killing variety, to carry out murders both in GGO and the real-life near-simultaneously, making its importance to the overall series' story that much more vital.
• Wolverine Publicity: One of the most popular villains of Sword Art Online. Trailers for Fatal Bullet made sure to show him off, even though he's not that prominent in the actual game.

Axiom Church Leadership

Quinella

Quinella

Voiced by: Maaya Sakamoto (Japanese), Maureen Price (English), Carla Castañeda, Karla Tovar (child), Rommy Mendoza (elderly) (Latin American Spanish)

"To love is to control. I love everything. I rule everything."

The Pontifex of the Axiom Church and the absolute highest authority in the Human Empire. At one point in her life, Quinella discovered the full list of Sacred Arts available in the Underworld, which she used to restore her youth and make herself immortal, along with attaining the power of the Cardinal System that runs the world, effectively making herself a god. Declaring herself the Administrator of the Underworld, Quinella was responsible for corrupting society, ensuring that the nobles could live a lavish lifestyle without ever needing to uprise against her, while the commoners were oppressed and suffered. Anyone who did have a chance of defying her, via breaking the Taboo System she implemented, would be arrested and brought before her, whereby she would transform them into one of her Integrity Knights.

She serves as the Big Bad of the first half of the Alicization arc, spanning volumes 9-14.

---

• Accidental Murder: Her implementation of the Taboo Index has caused incidents like this. One such example is when Rath caused a plague in the Underworld in hopes of forcing the people to break the laws so they can try to minimize possible deaths. However, the people's absolute adherence to the Index and it's rules against killing and stealing led to them not doing anything about it, leading to devastating casualties that could have been avoided.
• Accidental Truth: When she gave Scheta the Black Lily Sword, she encouraged her to cling to her murderous impulses and obsession with cutting, claiming that she'll find a way to break out of it as a result. Knowing Quinella, this is definitely an attempt at manipulating her into being an effective attack dog, But Scheta does end up finding a way out of her obsession, since it leads to her taking part in the War of Underworld and meeting Iskahn, who she falls in love with when he proves capable of resisting her slashes and soon realizes that in spite of her obsession, she doesn't want to kill or cut him.
• Actor Allusion: This wouldn't be the first time Maaya Sakamoto voiced a video game AI that had seemingly infinite powers (and even resided in a cathedral) However, unlike Quinella, Aura shows herself to be a Benevolent A.I. who cares for the well-being of the players playing the game.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Her hair and eyes were described in the novels as silver with a platinum-like sheen. In all animated and illustrated media ever since, it's purple, with no noticeable luster.
• Adaptational Badass: Quinella is already a tough opponent in canon, having godlike powers and being able to kill Eugeo but once Kirito cleaves off her remaining arm, she immediately tries to flee and was burned to death when Chudelkin caught her off-guard. In Alicization Lycoris, while Quinella failed to kill Eugeo, she did survive her first confrontation with the Ruild trio and Cardinal (albeit reduced to a small sphere-like object) and has a contingency Evil Plan to cause chaos in UW by assimilating with the Main Visualizer, and then summoning monsters and other beings with Fluctlights through the Calamity Plants she implanted. It took a combination of Medina's Batman Gambit and the heroes ganging up on Quinella again to bring her down and even then, she went out like a champ this time around.
• Adaptational Modesty: In the game, she wears her dress for the entire final battle intact against Kirito, instead of going into her Full-Frontal Assault territory that she's better known for.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Downplayed. While her crimes are mostly the same in the anime adaptation, there are a few more scenes added in that make her overall more sympathetic. For one, her spirit lingers after her death and being proud of the empire that she created. Then after Bercouli's death, her spirit appears before him, showing awareness of her vileness and even some regret over her actions, while both are happy to reunite and are Together in Death.
  • Gets this treatment in the Cake Timeline. While she still gives off the impression of a Sociopathic tyrant with the God Complex who effectively sees her subjects as objects she can use and abuse as she pleases, there are moments where she's merciful and even warm, something Kirito and Eugeo pick up in her interactions with her riding dragon, and she appears more willing to actually negotiate with Cardinal than kill her outright after being convinced by the two new Integrity Knights. This actually appears to be a plot-point, as Charlotte feels compelled to report this behavior to Cardinal.
• The Ageless: Her original effort to take over the Cardinal system of UW resulted in her fusing with it, granting her eternal youth and the removal of the need to eat and drink. However, she wasn't satisfied with just that.
• All Cloth Unravels: It takes only a tug of a knot on her nightgown to strip completely naked in front of Eugeo. Knowing her, this could be intentional.
• An Arm and a Leg: Her right arm was severed when Eugeo (in sword form) clashed with Quinella's blade. She subsequently transmutes said arm into another sword to kill Kirito with. And even that other arm is lopped off in battle later on when the two stab each other in such a way Quinella is also able to take one of Kirito's arms in exchange. Subverted in ''Lycoris'', where she and Kirito both apparently end the duel with all of their arms intact.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • To Cardinal. Being her antithesis, Cardinal exists for the sole reason of ending Quinella. The two have spent centuries battling and attempting to thwart one another. Quinella wanting nothing more than to hunt Cardinal down and kill her, while Cardinal wants to put an end to Quinella's reign and reclaim Administrator powers. Quinella has utter glee when she finally gets the chance to kill Cardinal and makes sure to enjoy every second of it.
  • To Kirito, with both eventually coming to see each other as this. Kirito discovers that Quinella is the one responsible for everything bad that happened to him in the Underworld, and dedicates his efforts to bringing her down, while ensuring that others who were once fiercely loyal to the Pontifex see her for the vile being she is. This becomes especially the case when Quinella kills Eugeo, earning her a place among Kirito's most hated enemies of all time. While Quinella originally saw Kirito as nothing but an insignificant bug who dared to defy her and waiting to be crushed, she attains special hatred for him when she finds out he's special, being from the other side of the outside world. Kirito giving Quinella a reality check in reminding her there are true gods on the outside infuriates her, and her hatred for Kirito only grows when he continues to resist her, being the last one standing. Worth noting is, even among the others who resisted her, Quinella at least is able to show a twisted form of affection such as to Alice, Eugeo, and even Cardinal, whereas she never once gives this treatment to Kirito and derogatorily refers to him as "boy".
  • To Eugeo. While his hatred was initially aimed towards the Axiom Church itself, later it gets centered on Quinella since she is the one responsible for everything. It becomes very personal after she subjects Eugeo to Mind Rape and make him susceptible to Synthesis, before later when he breaks free revealing she put forced Synthesis on Alice. Eugeo later decides that it is his purpose to bring Quinella down due to wishing to atone for his actions and gives up his life to ensure it happens.
  • To Alice. While originally Alice was fiercely loyal to the Pontifex and the Axiom Church, Kirito's influence began to cast more and more doubt upon her, and she uncovered more about the truth on Quinella's corruption. It reached the point where Alice openly abandoned her duties as an Integrity Knight and chose to oppose her former master. While her hatred for Quinella isn't quite as intense as Kirito and Eugeo's due to her conflicting loyalty, she still very much despises the Pontifex. Though this sentiment isn't quite as much shared on Quinella's side who views Alice's rebelling as an inconvenience and still sees her as an adequate doll that can be reprogrammed to do her bidding.
• Awesome by Analysis: Her personality aside, there's something to be said for her skills. She was the first UW resident to figure out how to create offensive skills, restore her life, overturn the Cardinal System, copy her Fluctlight onto others, and forcibly alter the Fluctlights of others into her personal Servants... all because she spent a large amount of time just analyzing how the Sacred Arts of the Underworld worked.
• Back from the Dead: The plot of Alicization Lycoris is set in motion by Kirito's decision to use the Night Sky Sword to kill Quinella ending up backfiring hard on him and the others. It allowed Quinella to take advantage of the sword's ability to absorb resources from the Gigas Cedar Tree to turn herself into a gigantic tree and install Calamity Plants to bring back monsters and beings with Fluctlights Back from the Dead, connecting her own will with the Main Visualizer to make the entire thing happen.
• Bad Boss: It's repeatedly shown that she views the Senators and Integrity Knights as more like tools than people.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: She is shown to enjoy killing animals in her childhood to level herself up.
• Barrier Change Boss: As a boss in Rising Steel, she makes use of barrier moves in each fight that nullifies damage from either physical attacks in her first and magic attacks in the second. As the Final Boss, she alternates between the two.
• Bathing Beauty: Her Full Limit Break art and profile description as [Eternal Beauty] Quinella in Rising Steel depicts her enjoying a bath.
  Eternal beauty... how boring. Listening to the sounds of water drops falling, she finally can relax and wash all these thoughts away. Cracks of light illuminated on her skin while her wet hair accentuated her undeniable beauty. She stretched out her elegant legs from the snow white bathtub as the fragrance of flowers wrapped itself around her aura. Through the thin screen of steam, her allure entices
• Beauty Is Bad: The Underworld's Most Beautiful Woman, and a self-centered Sociopath with a Sadistic streak and has no qualms with manipulating and Mind Raping anyone to suit her own ends.
• Big Bad: For the first half of Alicization, she is the head villain, being the leader of the Axion Church and thus the world itself. She is responsible for Alice's arrest, the corruption in the nobility, the lack of preparation the Human Empire has for the Final Stress Test, and the later revelation of the even more sinister plot of converting the Human Empire into Sword Golems to battle the Dark Territory.
• Blatant Lies: She swears to the Goddess Stacia that if Chudelkin helps defeat her enemies, she'll let him do whatever he wants with her body for one night. While Chudelkin can't fathom the idea of lying, Kirito knows that Quinella doesn't believe in Stacia, so her oath means nothing. Cardinal is smart enough to see through this, and insists that Quinella swear by the one thing that matters to her — her own Fluctlight.
• Blow You Away: Blasted Eugeo aside using a gust of wind after thwarting his assassination attempt.
• Body Horror: Her skin starts cracking when she's near death after Kirito stabbed her.
• Body Surf: First started doing this once she realized that her current body could no longer contain all her memories and needing a new body to store her new experiences, but as time went on it became about attaining complete immortality.
• Breakout Villain: Subverted. While she doesn't get to return to the series after her defeat, the anime does seem to acknowledge her popularity by not only giving her additional scenes but ones that depict her in a redeeming light.
  • After her initial defeat the anime adds a scene that shows her spirit getting to proudly observe the empire she created one last time as she passes on.
  • In War of the Underworld, her spirit returns after Bercouli is killed in combat and the two are reunited Together in Death.
• Casting a Shadow: Generated a ball of darkness using the Umbral Element Sacred Arts, and can have Silvery Eternity fire bolts of dark lightning.
• Clothing Damage: After Eugeo breaks free from her brainwashing and attacks her, her nightgown is left shredded, with it losing losing it's durability and disappearing soon after.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: She's the first Big Bad who is a female and isn't a human from the real world, a sharp contrast with her predecessors. She's also the first villain who isn't an obvious Evil Counterpart to Kirito, instead paralleling Alice. She's also the first who had her fall to villainy and ascension to power told in great detail, rather than being presented as just another bad guy straight from the get-go.
• Control Freak: Quinella is a corrupt, narcissistic and callous psychopath who is not above killing, torturing, and brainwashing anyone to keep UW for herself, though her methods of doing so are different from the standard. She spends most of her time asleep in order to preserve precious memory space, but the laws she placed over the land and its people might as well be God-given edicts to follow consciously or subconsciously given her authority and are enforced by her Integrity Knights. In the backstory, while she fused with the Cardinal System to regulate UW, her original intention was to outright steal its powers and authority for herself.
• Corrupt Church: She is the Pontifex of the Axiom Church, which is the leading authority in the human empire, but is more akin to a tyrant that rules the land with an iron fist while painting the allusion she's a benevolent ruler and emmisary of the gods.
• The Corrupter: Quinella preys on Eugeo's emotions and his desire to be loved, twisting his memories and breaking him, before turning him into her own loyal servant.
• Dark Action Girl: Being female does not stop her from being gifted at sword fighting.
• Dark Messiah: Preaches herself as the will of God and the savior of humanity, when in reality she governed the human realm with an iron fist and is concerned with nothing but self-preservation.
• Death by Irony: Quinella, a Control Freak who manipulated and brainwashed people into having Undying Loyalty to her, is burned alive by Chudelkin, quite possibly her most obsessive follower.
• Death Equals Redemption: Implied. While the spirit of her Bercouli meets when he dies is stated to be the version of her that exists in his Fluctlight, and in turn is more benevolent than she actually was, what’s hinted to be her actual spirit appears to cheer Kirito on when he fights Gabriel.
• Demiurge Archetype: Her backstory paints her as one, though overlapping with Satanic Archetype. She rebelled against the Underworld's version of God in order to become one herself, setting herself up as one gifted by the gods before constructing a false faith in her own name, eventually succeeded in her goals, and ruled by her specially-prepared laws and her Integrity Knights.
• Dirty Coward: Zigzagged. Despite being more competent and attractive than Sugou, she's very rotten to the core and the reason why she's a Control Freak in the first place is because she fears losing power and influence to the people of UW. That being said, she's certainly willing to fight herself.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Her biggest undoing is failing to anticipate that Kirito and Eugeo's swords are not made from metal, which she has not made herself impervious to.
  • Nor Chudelkin barely surviving his injuries and ruining her getaway, killing her in the process.
  • She also got one in the Gameverse, when she realized that the blade that Kirito wielded (which originally belonged to Medina and the blade was fused with her Fluctlight) is revealed to be a divine object made out of an actual human's flesh and blood, meaning it had the capability to use Armament Full Control as well. Plus, since it's revealed that Medina's bloodline is actually the the key to create the gate to the real world the blade had a reality bending power as well, which ultimately led to her downfall.
• Didn't Think This Through: Surprisingly Played for Laughs in the If You Were Here timeline. After Kirito reveals that he knows about the Synthesis Ritual and tries arguing for why she shouldn't perform it on him and Eugeo by noting how tedious the process of doing the ritual then mind wiping the people they interacted with would be, she ends up whining about how much of a "pain in the ass" the whole thing is and admits that the only reason she still does it is because she's done it so many times with the same "Summoned from the Celestial Realm" story that revealing the truth to her Knights would effectively screw her over.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Serves as the Big Bad of the first half of Alicization before Gabriel takes over.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Her forced synthesis of Eugeo looks very suspiciously like she's seducing him... or past that point already◊ and gone to full-on sex.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted. It's heavily implied she molested Eugeo, which is depicted as horrific and it clearly isn't supposed to be funny.
• Do Wrong, Right: In "Memories of Bygone Days: Alice", one of her issues with Rath trying to use two different "natural" disasters to kill off some Fluctlights and possibly spur the survivors into fighting for food is that she saw it as "uninspired".
• Draco in Leather Pants: In-Universe: After he dies, Bercouli happens to meet Quinella's ghost, or more accurately the version of her that existed in his Fluctlight before he learned of her true nature and as a result is a much kinder and warmer individual to reflect how he saw her beforehand, with the two of them treating each other like old friends as they pass on.
• Dragon Rider: Like her Integrity Knights, Quinella has a personal riding dragon who she has dubbed Yukiori and is apparently the oldest and strongest of the dragons the Knights use. Like its master, it appears to spend most of it's time asleep.
• Driven to Suicide: After fusing with Cardinal, the sub-process within it deemed Quinella "an error" due to her intentional direct manipulation of the UW residents and, in times of emotional distress, took control of her with the intent of making her kill herself. After several failed attempts due to Quinella taking back control at the last second, she only stopped this by forcibly sealing her emotions away.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: While already quite corrupt, Quinella becomes increasingly vile the more power she attains. Rising Steel implies that while she started as an earnest and sweet girl despite being Nobility, being given a Calling dedicated to advancing the Sacred Arts and making great deals of progress, being able to weaponize it and make weather predictions, followed by her village believing her to be a goddess as a result, was her Start of Darkness.
• Establishing Character Moment: Her first scene has her waking up in bed while completely nude, showing that she has no problem showing off her sexuality.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • In her own warped, twisted way, she did seem to care about the Underworld as the world she created. This could be why her spirit appears to support Kirito during his fight against Subtilizer, seeing as the latter plans to destroy the Underworld.
  • The Cake timeline also depicts her as close with Yukiori, her own personal riding dragon, with Kirito even describing her as looking like a normal girl when seeing her interact with them.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even she is sick of Chudelkin's shenanigans and often tells him off when he's being rude to the Integrity Knights or going over the top in smothering her with praise. It's a wonder why she even keeps him around.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Quinella has no understanding of what love really is. To her, love is just desire, something that can be acquired through an exchange, and a means of controlling people.
• Evil Counterpart: To Alice. Like Quinella, Alice was very talented in the Sacred Arts. One of Alice's most well-known abilities was to predict a storm one week in advance at a rather young age, while Quinella was also able to predict the weather in advance, though only 3 days in advance. A notable difference between the two is that Quinella was born in a noble family in the capital, while Alice was born in a family of villagers in one of the most remote villages in the Human Empire. It's implied Alice might have walked down a similar path to Quinella had Eugeo and Kirito not been in her life from near the start.
• Evil Genius: Quinella is an esteemed prodigy and the greatest Sacred Arts user seen in the Underworld. She managed to invent many rituals herself, as well as discovering every System Command in that existed in the Underworld.
• Evil Is Petty: Brainwashing and forcing immortality on skilled swordsmen and criminals so that they can enforce her control is one thing, but learning she did the same to some seemingly random girl with a knack for Wind Sacred Arts just so she can have someone to operate an elevator is where you truly realize how low her opinion of the Underworld's residents is.
• Evil Laugh: While she usually remains calm and composed, when she really gets in the moment then she can let off some unhinged cackles.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: The Anime hints that this is why her ghost supports Kirito during his fight with Gabriel, since she, for all her faults, did care for the Underworld in her own twisted way, whereas Gabriel was planning to destroy it and turn it into his personal world where he's God and can manipulate the souls he sees fit.
• Exact Words:
  • When Chudelkin requests that he have a night with access to her body in exchange for taking out the rebels, she agrees and swears to Stacia. The thing is, not only does she not believe in Stacia, but she's the one who made her up to begin with, meaning she effectively gave him an empty promise.
  • The reason she gives for putting Renly into stasis is that he was "defective". While his trauma-induced inability to fight could be what she meant, and is likely what Renly thought she meant, Rising Steel gives these words another potential meaning; When Renly was synthesized, Quinella was shocked when he asked if there was supposed to be someone with him, referring to his Best Friend who he promised to become an Integrity Knight alongside only to accidentally kill him during the Four Empires Unity Tournament. This tipped her off to the possibility that his memories weren't completely blocked and that the Synthesis Ritual has some issues she needs to fix, giving her reason to Deep Freeze him in case he remembered everything on his own and blabbed to the other Knights, with his inability to master the Twin-Edged Wings being a convenient excuse.
• Face Death with Dignity: In the anime, despite her horror at realizing she's going to die, she calms down when she sees a vision of the empire and world she always sought to build and manages to find peace with it before exploding, while smiling, no less.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Quinella has an angelic theme to her design. Her light purples and whites give off a generally non-threatening look, and at a glance, one would be forgiven for thinking she were a heroine rather than a villain. Quinella is perfectly aware of her "innocent" appearance, and uses it to mask her true nature as she manipulates others.
• Failed a Spot Check: Had she bothered to check and make sure Chudelkin was actually dead (by nature of Disappears into Light, like Cardinal), he wouldn't have been alive to ruin her getaway attempt and kill her.
• Fan Disservice: Sure, she has an extremely attractive body (that she has no qualms about showing off), but the way she smoothly seduces Eugeo (along with some of her other seductress-esque behaviors) is rather uncomfortable to watch. Then there's her losing both her arms and getting a Torso with a View after dueling Kirito in the buff, with visible cracks all over her body.
• Faux Affably Evil: She maintains an air of formality towards her enemies, despite seeing everyone as nothing but fodder for turning into sword golems. When turning Eugeo into an Integrity Knight, she showers him with false affection in order to make him remove his core protection. She only drops the facade when encountering setbacks such as Cardinal fusing Eugeo with his sword or Kirito cutting her remaining arm off.
• Final-Exam Boss: With her access to the system as Administrator, Quinella knows every fighting style and system call art in the Underworld and how to exploit them, as well as copying the Aincrad Style from Eugeo's memories. It takes Eugeo's Heroic Sacrifice to give Kirito a second sword for his signature dual-wielding style and a Heroic Second Wind to even the odds, and even then she still gives him a solid challenge with only a single arm.
• Foil: To Sugou, being a more competent Distaff Counterpart to him. Parallels can be seen in that they are both raised as privileged people who grew to be corrupt and made and declared themselves the gods of a world. They both also perform awful experiments on innocents and have very twisted understanding of love. Kirito also calls both of them out for being false rulers with a God Guise. However their difference lie in that Sugou is an Abhorrent Admirer who feels entitled to have Asuna, while Quinella loves no one but herself and only wishes for everyone to server her. In addition while both perform experiments on victims' minds, Sugou states he does not want to tamper with Asuna's mind except as a final resort due to wanting to turn her into a doll, while Quinella effectively made all of her Integrity Knights into her dolls and outright refers to them as that.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Once, she was a simple resident (a noble, yes, but still something not too impressive in the grand scheme of things) of UW that discovered several key facts about the world, such as how to perform offensive commands and that killing things would increase her stats. Developing these powers further throughout her life, she eventually discovered how to raise her Authority to the level of Cardinal itself on her deathbed, making herself a Physical God in the process. Not content with sharing power, however, she tried to steal Cardinal's powers for herself but only succeeding in fusing with it to gain its functions of regulating the world, but even then she went much further than Cardinal intended.
• Full-Frontal Assault: She has no problems fighting without any clothes on, as Kirito and Alice found out.
• Gaining the Will to Kill: In her backstory she was among the first residents to realize that she could create offensive commands for the purpose of fighting and killing other things...and then realizing that doing so made her stronger with each kill...
• Gaslighting: She twists Eugeo's perception of his feelings and even his own memories to make him believe he's a lonely and forsaken individual that only she herself could "save". She also wipes her Integrity Knights' memories after a century or so to make them forget grievances.
• A God Am I: After attaining the powers of the Cardinal System, she declares herself the Administrator of Underworld, which Cardinal considers the most arrogant name possible.
• Godiva Hair: The only thing hiding her lady bits whenever she's naked is her long hair, along with some rare strategic object placement.
• Go Out with a Smile: In the anime, just as she's dying, she sees one last vision of the empire she once controlled, looking at it with pride before she's gone for good.
• Gratuitous English: Being well versed in System Commands and their meanings, she often spouts English words midspeech.
• Handicapped Badass: Despite losing an arm, she still has sword skills from both the Underworld and Aincrad, allowing her to overwhelm Kirito until he dual wields his own sword and Eugeo's.
• Heavy Sleeper: She spends the majority of her days in her chambers asleep. Justified, as it allows her to preserve as much memory space in her Fluctlight (and by extension, her lifespan) as possible.
• Hero Killer:
  • Not only did she turn Eugeo into her lackey, but she also killed him. One might also consider Charlotte's death given how it was her Golem, or Cardinal, since she fried her with energy blasts, before the latter used the last of her strength to empower Eugeo before his eventual demise.
  • In Lycoris she killed Medina instead, though in reality this was part of Medina's Batman Gambit to kill Quinella, so Quinella unknowingly doomed herself instead.
• Hey, You!: She always calls Kirito "boy," as a reference to his coming from another world.
• Human Shield: Quinella's Sword Golems are not only effective killing machines which never stop fighting for all eternity, driven by the emotion of love that got twisted into blind instinct, but the fact that they were once humans means that Cardinal cannot bring herself to attack them.
• Hypocrite:
  • "Memories of Bygone Days: Alice", she's quick to realise that Rath caused the recent volcanic eruption and storm to spur the Fluctlights there into breaking the Taboo Index, and bemoans their cruelty after fixing the issue herself. While not wrong of her assessment of Rath, she has little room to call them out seeing as she sees every other Artifical Fluctlight as little more than dolls or bugs for her to toy with, and is not above subjecting them to experiments for her own research endeavours.
• Identical Stranger: Even though it is never stated in-universe, Quinella resembles Asuna Yuuki.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Played with. She actually did age normally all the way to the end of her natural lifespan, but she was able to restore her youth just in time and then granted herself immortality, forever preserving her with the appearance of a twenty something woman.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Stabbed in the heart by Kirito during their duel - which lands a critical blow. It doesn't kill her though, since she had a sliver of health left - enough to make a last-ditch escape attempt.
• Improbable Weapon User: An odd example. After Silvery Eternity is destroyed and her arm is severed by Eugeo's suicidal charge, she picks up said severed arm and uses Sacred Arts to convert it into a new rapier, which she uses for the rest of the battle against her. In layman's terms, she spends the reminder of the final battle wielding her own severed arm.
• Improvised Weapon: After Silvery Eternity was destroyed and her right arm was severed, she decides to transform her arm into both a rapier, and later, a katana, in order to fight Kirito.
• Insistent Terminology: Implied. She's not shown to have any real issues with her old name, but she goes by "Administrator" in the present and appears annoyed when Kirito calls her Quinella instead.
• It's All About Me: Attempted to steal Cardinal's Authority and/or destroy it simply because she couldn't stand the idea of another having equal Authority as her over UW. It did become slightly more justified when revealed that Cardinal tried at multiple points to make her kill herself after their fusion... but only because Quinella by that point had already started directly interfering with the lives of UW residents, something she wasn't supposed to do at all.
• Karmic Death: After arrogantly promising to grant Chudelkin's wish to touch her body if he disposed of the rebels, with no intention of keeping her word. Guess who ends up killing her? Chudelkin using his last breath to Incarnate the remains of his broken body into a fiery swarm and launches himself at Quinella so he can finally get the reward she longed for, with Quinella both horrified and disgusted at the repulsive clown touching her body.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Her turning the Elevator Operator into what she is, an immortal Emotionless Girl forced to recite Wind Sacred Arts all day with very few breaks to the point that she's forgotten her own name, is seen as this by Kirito and Eugeo and as a sign of how she views the people she rules over. And that's before she introduces the Sword Golem...
  • She's also utterly contemptuous of Chudelkin even after he "dies" fighting for her. Alice, despite being fairly cold, is quite appalled at how callous Quinella is over the death of one of her servants. Although considering Chudelkin's general behaviour, this comes off more as Kick The Son Of A Bitch.
  • She also taunts Alice over how painful the process of forcibly turning her into an Integrity Knight must have been.
  • In a flashback, she contemptuously dismisses the traumatized Renly as "broken" before sealing him away.
  • In the Gameverse, her labelling the Orthinanos family as "defects", knowing that the weight of her words would make them pariahs among the nobility and subject it's descendants to horrendous abuse from other nobles.
  • In "Memories of Bygone Days: Alice", she immediately refuses Alice's plea to help a Southacroith village when it comes under attack by monsters after suffering the aftereffects of a volcanic eruption and getting hit by a powerful storm. And while she does fix it in the end by putting a stop to both of the latter two, she only does so as in a move of spite towards Rath, who she realized caused both the eruption and the storm to force the residents to do their whims.
• Kill It with Fire: Not only does she possess fire spells, but Chudelkin setting her on fire is what does her in, and by accident, no less.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Quinella created loyal followers that came to be known as her Integrity Knights, who have their memories sealed off and will unquestioningly carry out her bidding.
• Leitmotif: Has a theme consisting of a choir's ominous chanting.
• Light Is Not Good: She has long white hair and wears a white gown, and she's the Underworld's Satanic Archetype.
• Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: She tends to dress in lavender/white and is otherwise associated with bright colors, while Kirito continues his Dark Is Not Evil theme, especially prominent when he uses Incarnation to manifest his Black Swordsman attire from SAO.
• Manipulative Bitch:
  • She manipulated Eugeo into removing his Core Protection to turn him into a Integrity Knight, using Gaslighting and praying on his loveless background and skewed idea of it.
  • In Scheta's segment of "The Knight's Recollection", she spends the entire event grooming Scheta to be a powerful attack dog for her to use. Tempting her with "a sword that can cut through anything", she actively encourages her obsession with cutting and lies, or so she thinks, that her continuing on her path would find her a way out of it to motivate her. She then goes as far as to manipulating another Knight into duelling Scheta, likely knowing he'd be killed, just to test the Black Lily Sword's capabilities.
• Master Swordswoman: Despite losing an arm, she proves skilled enough to keep pace with Kirito while he's Dual Wielding against her, even managing to take one of his arms at the cost of her remaining one.
• My Skull Runneth Over: After ruling for seventy years as an Immortal Ruler, Quinella discovered that her FluctLight had reached its limit of stored memories, so the solution she came up with was overwrite a child's FluctLight with her own memories and FluctLight using the Synthesis Ritual. Though this would be her undoing as she ended up giving this girl power equal to her own and she would end up becoming Cardinal.
• Moral Myopia: When asked why she would go the atrocious deeds of enslaving the souls of innocent people to become her Integrity Knights and not even being able to entrust them, she argues that her Piety Modules she implanted in her knights were out of an act of love which she reserved only for them, as it freed them from worry and pain and making them beautiful dolls who didn't need to think. In Quinella's eyes all her actions are just and she has done nothing wrong.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • Has been regularly referred to as beautiful, voluptuous, and her clothing doesn't try to hide much of her figure, if she's even wearing any. Not to mention how she seduced Eugeo and fought against Kirito and Alice in the nude.
  • In Rising Steel, most of her Limit Break art has her naked in some way, [Sweet Trap] having her laying seductively in her bed, [The World I Should Love] having her fighting nude, [Eternal Beauty] showing her in the bath, and [Whimsical Rhapsody], which has her sitting seductively in an ornate sofa. The only exception thus far is [The Glow in Your Hands] Administrator, and even then she's the first Administrator unit to enter battle and appear on the homescreen in the buff. She only avoids the nudity on all sides as [Memories in the Snowy Skies] Quinella, instead wearing a Sexy Santa Dress.
• Mystical White Hair: Fitting for one who considers herself the goddess of UW and has the power to back it up.
• Narcissist: Quinella believes that as the elegant "goddess" of UW, everyone should kneel before her.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Quinella's attempt to amend her overflowing memory by imprinting to another FluctLight was what allowed Cardinal to split off from her and seize control of another individual, the little girl who would come to be known as Cardinal and resist her.
• No-Sell: She made her skin as hard as iron and therefore impervious to any metal weapon. This is why Eugeo's dagger failed even with the element of surprise. There's a heavy emphasis on the weapon being metal however - Eugeo and Kirito's swords bypass this drawback by being made of ice and wood, respectively - even Divine Objects are transmuted by Quinella herself into metal weapons in an attempt to counter this loophole.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: While she claims that turning half the Underworld (including her Knights) into sword golems is for their own safety, it's clear by her actions that she's nothing but a narcissistic Control Freak who's no better than any of the other psychopaths Kirito has faced, like Sugou or Laughing Coffin. In fact, Quinella's refusal to allow the existence of any military force that she can't control has doomed the realm of humanity, and this realization helps Kirito win Alice over to his side.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: She's almost exclusively referred to as "The Pontifex" or "Administrator" rather than Quinella. She's somewhat amused when Kirito calls her by her name.
• Pet the Dog: A few examples, though all things considered, they could all just be Pragmatic Villainy.
  • In "Homeside Waterfront", Alice states that she got a valuable catalyst from her to use to heal Amayori's seemingly unhealable wound.
  • In "Memories of Bygone Days: Bercouli", while baffled at first, she takes Bercouli's request to make a giant bathhouse rather seriously.
• Physical Goddess: She imbued her FluctLight with the Cardinal sub-processor, which was essentially the god of the Underworld, and hence amassed its unlimited power.
• Playing with Fire: Ranked up by killing foxes with fire arrows, and can shoot fire from her fingertips without having to recite anything.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Dakira's backstory heavily Implies that the Taboo Index outlawed same-sex relationships, with even having such feelings in the first place being grounds for arrest even if you don't act on them. And in case you need any reminding, breaking any of the Taboo Index's laws is (publicly) punishable by death.
• Posthuman Nudism: Discards her entire dress after attaining godhood by implanting the administrative abilities inside her FluctLight.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Her outlawing of things like murder and entering the Dark Territory where there's monsters is done less for the sake of morals and protecting her people, and more to ensure that no one can do what she did to increase her Object Control Authority and System Authority growing up, ensuring her place as the most powerful being in the Underworld.
• Prehensile Hair: After losing both her arms, she resorts to turning her hair into needles. She also attempts to use a console by using her hair as fingers, or as razor-sharp blades and Combat Tentacles in a last ditch-attempt to kill Kirito with in their duel.
• Promoted to Playable: She is a playable character in several mobile games, and currently has the most playable appearances out of all the antagonists.
  • In Memory Defrag, she's first introduced as [Seductress] Administrator as part of the Sleeping Art Online April Fools Event, where she serves as the Big Bad. Later on, she gains two more Units called [Coneqeror of Love] and [High Pontifex].
  • Has her most playable appearances Rising Steel.
    • [Sweet Trap] Administrator, featured in the “Gift from the High Pontifex” banner and her first playable Unit; a Light-Elemental Break Unit with a unique skillset that allows her to gain more Charge or inflict more Break when her foes are afflicted with Continuous Damage.
    • [The World I Should Love] Administrator, featured in the “Fearless Resistance” banner; a Fire-Elemental Charge Unit with an Enhance Mode that has her do a Full-Frontal Assault, while her Charge deals Continious Damage while her Assault deals added damage to enemies afflicted with it.
    • [Eternal Beauty] Administrator, featured in the "Eternal Beauty" banner; a magic wielding Wind-Element Charge Unit with an Enhance Mode whose playstyle focuses on increasing the Recollection Field to deal more damage.
    • [Whimsical Rhapsody] Administrator, featured in the "1.5 Anniversary - Part 3" banner; a Non-Element Charge Unit who's the closest to a Support Party Member, possessing a Charge Move that increases the party's critical damage while debuffing the enemies Incarnate Break, an Assault Skill that increases the party's attack, and a heal move that increases the party's physical resistance while adding a bar to the Recollection field.
    • [The Glow In Your Hands] Administrator, featured in the "Memories of Bygone Days Part 2" banner; another Fire-Element Charge Unit, though with a different skillset. This version of her puts a good deal of emphasis on increasing Charge, her Charge attack creating more when the Recollection field is three or higher, her first Assault Skill increasing her personal charge by x1.3 for one turn, and her Incarnate Skill creates a Recollection Field that, while active, increases the party's Charge when Incarnate is 40% or lower. And to round things up, her second Assault Skill deals Continuous Damage and adds 1 to the recollection field.
    • [Memories in the Snowy Skies] Administrator, featured as part of the Christmas-themed scout of the same name; an Earth-element Break Unit who can recover her own HP with her Break Skill, Draw Aggro with her Assault Skill, and can buff herself to increase her ATK to up to 30% and her Physical Resistance to up to 50%, as well enabling herself to Counter-Attack whenever she's hit.
• Properly Paranoid: Her decision to make herself immune to metal and make it so every Divine Object she makes or bequeaths to her Knights are made of metal proves to be this when Eugeo's attempt to use Cardinal's Dagger on her fails, as it would have teleported her to Cardinal's domain and given the latter a homefield advantage against her. She's further vindicated when she fights Kirito, with him being able to defeat her due to both the Night Sky Sword and Blue Rose Sword not being able of metal, instead being wood and ice respectively.
• Purple Is Powerful: Her white outfit and hair has light purple shades in them, along with her eyes, and she's certainly powerful as the Administrator of Underworld.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Heavily implied to have molested Eugeo in the process of turning him into an Integrity Knight, with the scene in which she brainwashes him being filled with innuendo.
• Reality Warper: Possessing Cardinal's Authority gives her the ability to use very high-level System Commands that virtually allow her to shape the reality of UW to her will.
• Really 700 Years Old: She's 363 years old and retains her youthful appearance, both of which are made possible only after meddling with the Cardinal system in an attempt to control it.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • She acts like one in regards to the Knights, often overlooking any rudeness, such as when they're initially summoned and Eydis' informal behaviour, and granting certain requests, such as Linel and Fizel's desire to become Integrity Knights after freeing them from her Ressurection experiment. This is in contrast to Chudelkin, who endlessly picks on them over anything he can find and often gets angry when they do something that could be seen as disrespectful to himself or Quinella.
  • In "Memories of the Abyss", she further cultivates this image by letting Eydis off the hook after she lost control of her Divine Object and attacked Bercouli, knowing fully well of the possibility of that happening.
• Royal Rapier: Silvery Eternity, her rapier, signifying her prestige and authority as the Ruler of the Underworld with its pimped-out design. It ends up a Wrecked Weapon during her fight with Kirito when Eugeo decides to intervene, though she's quick a forge a new one from her severed arm.
• Sadist: Despite freezing most of her emotions, she still takes pleasure in killing Cardinal slowly and states that she wants to see Kirito's despair.
• Sanity Slippage: It's really subtle but in Lycoris after her first death, she absolutely lose herself when Kirito managed to kill her and when she got resurrected she'll do anything to screw him and the others, along with the entirety of the Underworld, on their attempt to kill her again, especially Kirito whom she despise so much that she willingly bring down the entire Underworld just to kill him. This get worse when Kirito finally defeated her for the second time and by the third and the final time Kirito fought her, she's reduced to Laughing Mad from combination of her defeat, her continuous resurrection and perhaps from wielding the power of the Main Visualizer (since the power give her an omnipresence, meaning she knew about everything in Underworld but it's heavily implied wielding such a great power is to much for her soul).
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: After attaining godhood by imprinting Cardinal's system administrator abilities onto her FluctLight, she decided she was above simple things such as clothes, discarding her garments and often staying fully nude. Word of God says that she doesn't feel shame about being nude because she's realized she's in a simulation. Even her body isn't truly real, so what's the point of caring?
• Sinister Minister: She fancies herself as Axiom's high minister and rules UW with an iron fist.
• Sinister Nudity: Combined with Posthuman Nudism; Quinella dispels her dress during her villainous apotheosis and remains nude throughout the final battle except for some Godiva Hair. After Kirito chops off both her arms, she tries to strangle him to death with said hair, by the way.
• Sleeps in the Nude: She's introduced to the audience sleeping naked in her luxurious bed.
• Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: A huge jump from all of her predecessors in both power and threat. While previous SAO villains did make Kirito struggle, he could typically take them down on his own with limited assistance from the respective Arc Hero. Quinella however is godlike and initially towered over Kirito, whereby it took several sacrifices from his friends to wear her down before the playing field had been leveled for Kirito to match her. Also unlike the other villains who restricted their crimes to game communities, she has ruled over a human empire for centuries. Not only is she the first villain since Kayaba to land a significant physical blow to Kirito, she's also the one to severely damage Kirito's mental health, to the point where he becomes comatose and depressed (thanks to killing his friends), something that no other villain has come close to. Even to this day, her killing of Eugeo still haunts him, and that's after he defeated the next, more invincible villain - Gabriel Miller.
• The Sociopath: She never cares for the welfare of the UW people because it's all about her in her head. Justified in that she had to seal her emotions to prevent Cardinal from making her kill herself during times of emotional distress... but also double-subverted in that Quinella had already begun her experiments into manipulating the UW residents by this time, so she already was a psychopath, she just made herself worse. She feels no remorse for the trouble she's caused and even convinces her victims that she's helping them by twisting their feelings and memories.
• Statuesque Stunner: Towers over the other female characters, being even taller than Kirito despite being the same biological age as him appearance-wise.
• Strong and Skilled: While she could be mistaken for Unskilled, but Strong at first with her over-reliance on her godlike Administrator powers and mastery of the Sacred Arts, she is revealed to be as well versed in sword combat as Kirito himself. Even having worn her down with weapons that can harm her, she still spends a fair share of the fight thrashing Kirito by showcasing her knowledge of Sword Skills. After all, she did fuse with the Cardinal System and knows of the entire command list, so it's not like she couldn't gain the knowledge one way or another, either by peering through Eugeo's memories, or by having the Cardinal system record the data every time Kirito or Eugeo swung their swords.
• Stupid Evil: Quinella's Control Freak tendencies bite her in the ass when it's revealed that humanity is doomed because she refuses to allow the existence of any military force that isn't under her complete control. This realization is what convinces Alice to turn on her in favor of Kirito. Subverted in that she did have a plan. It just involved a lot Human Sacrifice to create robotic soldiers made of swords, which is arguably even worse.
• Super-Toughness: She's made herself immune to iron and all forms of metal, which is what most weapons in the world are made from. This is why Kirito and Eugeo's swords, which aren't made of metal, are able to hurt her.
• Sweet Tooth: In the Cake Timeline, being able to eat the new, exotic cakes Kirito replicates in the Underworld is the reason she's considering working together with Cardinal to properly protect the Underworld from invasion.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: During her final duel with Kirito, she uses her power in Sacred Arts to change the shape of her Royal Rapier in different sword types so she can use various type of Sword Skills against him, most notably changing it into a Katana.
• Terms of Endangerment: She uses the affectionate "-chan" honorific on Alice, even after it's become clear that Alice is now her enemy. She also occasionally calls Cardinal "Lyserith-chan."
• Too Powerful to Live: Notably Quinella is the first villain who was not allowed to remain alive after her defeat^note Kayaba chose to take his own life, albeit not by Kirito's hand. Had she succeeded in escaping to the real world, she would have been able to cause all sorts of chaos.
• Torso with a View: After Kirito impales her in the heart, what's left behind in the impact spot is a large hole in the center of her chest.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: In an original story in Rising Steel, we learn that before she received her Calling as a Sacred Arts researcher, Quinella came off as a kind girl who wanted to receive a calling so she could benefit her village in spite of her Noble Status, a far cry from the Sadistic Control Freak we meet in the present.
• The Vamp: Seduces Eugeo with the promise of fulfilling his desire to be loved, even stripping off all her clothes in front of him.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: After Kirito deals her a lethal wound she attempts to escape to the real world in a robotic body. It would have worked if Chudelkin had not been still alive.
• Villain Has a Point: When Kirito calls Quinella out on all the atrocities she committed of controlling her world, Quinella counter-argues that he's from a world of people who did the same thing by creating a world for their own purposes. So what right does a boy from such a world have to judge her?
• Villainous Friendship: Played With. Despite him being more of a Hero Antagonist than genuinely evil, she seemed to have a friendly relationship with Bercouli, the two of them apparently drinking win together in her quarters often and her even opening up to him about her paranoiac tendencies that prompted her Control Freak nature. Of course, knowing her, she may have just been faking it.
• Villainous Breakdown: She loses her cool when Eugeo fuses with his sword, enabling him to destroy her Sword Golem and cut off her arm - or when Kirito later impales her through the heart later on. While she could easily shrug it off the first two times (on account of having said arm transformed into a second sword, and an escape route into the real world), what really seals the deal is the panic on her face when Chudelkin unexpectedly shows up and sets her on fire, which thwarts her escape and eventually kills her, though she manages to regain control before her death.
  • Her breakdown is even more profounded in Lycoris, after Kirito manage to break her rapier with ,the currently fused Eugeo, Blue Rose Sword and Kirito used the Night Sky Blade to kill her, she let out a shrill Skyward Scream and she died with a face full of agony and hatred toward the man who killed her. Let just say when she get resurrected, she'll absolutely do anything to kill him and his friends to the point cutting of the Underworld communication with the real world AND bringing down the entire Underworld just to kill him simply out of spite. Pretty much showing how much she had lose herself by the time of the final act had began.
• Villain Takes an Interest: She's done this with a few of her Knights.
  • She apparently took a quick interest in Eydis after Synthesizing her, with her promising to give Eydis a dragon after her first mission, the earliest any Knight at the time has got theirs, and surprising Bercouli by expressing a desire to grant her a Divine Object upon her return, sending her to grab the material for it after only her second mission, curious as to whether she's maintain control of the sword's memories or lose her mind in the process. She also took notes from the experience so she could refine the Synthesis ritual.
  • Upon Scheta's recruitment, she approached her and proceeded to tempt her with a sword that could cut through anything, and then encourages her cutting obsession after she made it and granted it to her. She's disappointed however when Scheta requested to be put into Deep Freeze after she accidentally killed a fellow Knight in a duel, whom she offered to give a Divine Object to should he best her in a duel, pondering if she screwed up the Synthesis ritual or made the Black Lily Sword too sharp.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Even after her death, her reputation as a benevolent ruler is maintained due to the unrest that would be caused by her true nature going public. Kirito actually fears that the people learning of her death at his hands would ruin his own Universally Beloved Leader status as the Star King and head of the Human Unification Council.
• We Can Rule Together: She offers this to all three of the Rulid trio.
  • She first gives it to Eugeo offering him the love which he has desired all his life, to which he very nearly submits after being broken by her Mind Rape. Eugeo gets voluntarily subjected to Synthesis and Synthesised into an Integrity Knight, but eventually breaks free and tries to incapacitate Quinella himself with a special dagger created by Cardinal. Upon his betrayal being discovered, Quinella offers him a last chance to pledge his loyalty and destroying Cardinal's dagger. Eugeo of course refuses having finally come to understand what love is.
  • After she sees Alice has broken the Seal of the Right Eye by her own volition, she offers to re-Synthesise Alice so she would no longer feel pain or emotion. Alice angrily rejects this proposal, citing the pain allowed her to realize she was human and not a doll-like Integrity Knight.
  • She even gives this offer to Kirito, stating she'd spare his life if he went into her servitude as her secretary. Kirito of course pays no heed and continues fighting.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Inverted. Quinella actually constantly preaches love and that she gives it to her loyal followers, but the twist is that she does not truly understand what love is, using it as a placeholder word for 'desire' or 'control'.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: After her first death in Lycoris, Quinella attempt to resurrect herself cause her consciousness to stuck within the Main Visualizer, in which she manage to get an omnipresence ability, but it turns out that gaining omnipresence proves to be to much for her mind to handle that she winds up losing what last bit of her sanity and reasonable thinking, to the point she pretty much decide to preserve herself just because that was the only thing she can do with, which signing Quinella complete fall from grace to the point the entire Rulid trio simply pities her when they realize how pathetic and desperate she had became by the final battle, something she takes complete offense at. In the end after her defeat, Quinella manage to regain her sanity back as she died and realize how free she felt when the omnipresence ability is finally gone from her.
• World's Most Beautiful Woman: Stated to be this by a couple of characters, including Eugeo and Kirito. Even before becoming a Physical God, she was seen as one of the great beauties of the Underworld, which likely helped her convince people of her divinity.
• Would Hurt a Child: As Linel and Fizel can attest to, she has no problem harming children or using them in her Sacred Art experiments. In fact, in the one the aforementioned girls were in, she gathered about thirty children and had them all kill each other so she could test out a Sacred Art to bring people back from the dead, leading to large amounts of Body Horror, and only stopped when only Linel and Fizel were left, coming out of it severely traumatized and as the Cute and Psycho girls we now know.

Prime Senator Chudelkin

Prime Senator Chudelkin

Voiced by: Wataru Takagi (Japanese), Frank Todaro (English), Roberto Gutiérrez (Latin American Spanish)

Leader of the Senators, a group dedicated to enforcing the Taboo Index.

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• Acrofatic: Despite appearances, his main mode of transportation is to Be the Ball and he proves to be surprisingly nimble, constantly dancing and prancing about and is even able to do a headstand. Possibly Subverted when it turns out he's literally full of hot air.
• Ambiguously Human: Given his drastically different Non-Standard Character Design, it really makes one wonder what his species is.
• Bad Boss: Chudelkin is notorious for abusing the Integrity Knights; he rudely dismisses all of their concerns about the possibility of invasion by the Dark Territory, he insults them over the most trivial things, and is all too willing to Deep Freeze them if they displease him. This is despite the fact their existence alone is what prevents the Dark Territory from launching a full-scale invasion.
• Berserk Button: Don't even think about calling him a lump of meat if you don't want your head torn off.
• Be the Ball: His primary form of transport is to curl into a ball and bounce about the place.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He looks like a clown and seems relatively silly. But he's a sadistic individual who's highly skilled with Sacred Arts, and so should not be underestimated.
• Dirty Old Monk:
  • As the Prime Senator, Chudelkin is technically a member of the Axiom Church's clergy, yet he is an obsessive Stalker with a Crush towards Quinella, even requesting that he get a night with free access to her body in exchange for killing the Rulid Trio.
  • In Rising Steel, one of the Skits during the "Overflowing Eternal Affection" Scout, hints that he at least once entered the Great Baths during the girls times while Eydis was using her privacy to mock him.
• Disproportionate Retribution: He threatens to turn Eugeo into a horse the next time he fails to address Chudelkin with the "Kakka" honorific (roughly equivalent to "Your Excellency") after his "Prime Senator" title.
• The Dragon: He’s the second-in-command to Quinella, and unlike the Integrity Knights, he is straight out evil and delights in committing atrocities for her.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": He only ever refers to Integrity Knights by their numbers rather than their names.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Has a very deep gravelly voice and is likely the most evil being in the Axion Church save for Quinella herself. The dub makes his voice deeper yet to the point it resembles The Joker.
• Eye Scream: While casting his most powerful Sacred Art that conjures a giant fire genie, he burns his own eyes out.
• Evil Is Petty: When he's briefly brought Back from the Dead in Unleash Blading's second anniversary event, he forms an alliance with Sugou and Gabriel to crash Eydis' party since he wasn't invited.
• Fat Bastard: A pudgy fat man dressed like a clown who constantly mocks everyone around him.
• Faux Affably Evil: He speaks with a formal and polite tone, yet has no issue with addressing others condescendingly.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Less friend and more acquaintance. While he is on the same side as the Integrity Knights and technically their boss, none of them like him given he treats them like trash. Bercouli in fact outright despises him and when given the chance doesn't shy away from directly insulting him.
• Giggling Villain: He lets off a laugh of "Hoh-hoh-hoh!"
• Glass Cannon: He is one of the most powerful Sacred Users of all time (and possibly the best other than Quinella and Cardinal). However he has nothing in the way of physical ability, and goes down very easily if he takes even a slight amount of damage.
• Green-Eyed Monster: He is obsessed with Quinella and becomes aggressively jealous if she so much as even gives attention to anyone else.
• Gonk: He's a short, pudgy man with heavy makeup who doesn't look much like anyone on the Integrity Knights' side.
• Hated by All: It soon becomes clear there is absolutely no one, hero or villain, that likes Chudelkin. The Integrity Knights all range from not caring about him to outright despising him. Even Quinella feigns politeness around him and is all too eager to cast him aside like trash when he’s outlived his usefulness. In reality, she's also repulsed by him.
• Insistent Terminology: Always chastises anyone who doesn't refer to him by "Prime Senator".
• Irony: He, Quinella's most fervent follower, is the one who kills her in the end.
• Jerkass at Your Discretion: He's a very rude and abusive Bad Boss who torments anyone in sight... until Quinella appears where he suddenly piles on praise and polite language. The most disrespectful he ever gets is asking if she'll sleep with him if he disposes of Kirito, Eugeo and Alice, and even then he phrases it like a humble request.
• Kevlard: Inverted; while he's pudgy, he can take little punishment.
• Kick the Dog: He gleefully recounts how poorly Alice was treated, and how she despaired once her hopes of being able to return home were dashed before she ended up becoming an Integrity Knight, particularly how she begged not to forget the people who were most important to her.
• Light Is Not Good: Wears some white, and is a sadistic Psychopathic Manchild.
• Manipulative Bastard: Manipulated the Integrity Knights into fighting Kirito and Eugeo by putting them under the belief that they were invaders from Dark Territory.
• Mister Big: As the Prime Senator, he's the highest authority in the Central Cathedral save for Quinella herself. Yet he's diminutive and barely taller than a child. Also worth noting is he is a contender for the most powerful Sacred Arts user in the Human Empire, barring Quinella.
• Monster Clown: He dresses more like a jester than a clown, but otherwise he still gives off these vibes, and unlike the Integrity Knights he's unconditionally evil. Some of the characters even derogatorily refer to him as a clown.
• The Napoleon: Chudelkin is a short, arrogant man who's quick to berate the Integrity Knights who work under him either out of envy whenever Quinella treats them kindly, for merely questioning him or underdoing the praise he feels her rightfully deserves, or simply because he feels like it.
• No Indoor Voice: He yells at the top of voice for often no reason at times, to anyone other than Quinella.
• Not Quite Dead: It looked as though he had already met his end at the hands of Kirito, with Quinella even casting his lifeless body aside. But we later see he wasn't quite finished yet, and he uses presumably the last of his Durability to launch himself at Quinella's body to finally touch and be with her, much to her horror, whereby he burns the both of them out.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Everything about him, all the way down to his clashing colors and the 8-bit sound effects, looks nothing like a Sword Art Online character and more like he belongs in a completely different franchise.
• Not Brainwashed: Alice speculates that Chudelkin may be a victim of Quinella just like the Integrity Knights. Whether or not this is true, what's made clear is Chudelkin had full knowledge of what Quinella was really doing and not only supported her but actively partook in the immoral activities himself.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: He may be small, but he's a very powerful Scared Arts user.
• Playing with Fire: His most powerful Sacred Art involves summoning a gigantic fire genie.
• The Power of Lust: He's generally spends the arc as a Dirty Coward, but he's immediately motivated to fight when Quinella offers him a night with access to her body if he kills the Rulid Trio, even summoning a giant, fiery version of himself.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He's clearly an adult, but acts extremely immature; he throwing tantrums over the most trivial of things, dresses like a clown, and he giggles at the silliest of stuff. His private quarters is brightly colored room full of children's toys, like a child's bedroom. "Fearless Resistance" even shows him angrily bouncing up and down in response to Quinella requesting a late-night meeting with Bercouli so he can give his mission reports. However he is also Ax-Crazy and enjoys torture or ordering the execution of others.
• Sadist: He enjoys executions and torture, which includes gleefully recounting the time he put Alice through the Forced Synthesis Ritual, claiming that he wish he could have Deep Freezed her and used her to decorate his room solely for the pained expressions she made.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: In Rising Steel, while he seems to have beef with every Knight, he and Eydis simply cannot stand each other, with him always getting upset at her blatant lack of respect for him and laid back attitude.
• Slimeball: He rivals Sugou as the most detestable character in the whole series. Aside from the fact he's an evil Monster Clown, he's also smarmy, manipulative, and betrays his own allies without a second thought after coming upon someone more useful. In stark contrast to Quinella who is seductively Faux Affably Evil, he's downright abusive and condescending to the Integrity Knights and outright calls them puppets to do his bidding. He's a Dirty Coward who flees the second he's in danger and will not hesitate to reducing himself to grovelling. He also reveals he's just as sickly perverted as any of the other SAO villains before him (if not worse), lusting for Quinella and requesting he spend a night with access to her body if he were to dispose of the rebels.
• Smoke Out: It turns out his "fat" might actually be a large amount of smoke he has in his clothes, as shown when Alice impales him, causing it all to burst out and cover his escape.
• Smug Snake: Chudelkin is this in regards to the Dark Territory; he dismisses all the Knight's concerns about possible invasion. In Rising Steel, he even berates Eydis when she doesn't kill a group of them she finds doing something suspicious, instead opting to play it safe and report back to Bercouli, which many agree is the smarter option.
• Squishy Wizard: He's not much of a physical fighter, but he's incredibly skilled with Sacred Arts which are so destructive he can easily be a One-Man Army in his own right.
• Taking You with Me: He hugs Quinella while he's on fire, immolating her before she can escape to the real world via a console.
• Vague Age: While his exact age is never specified, though he's Implied to have been bossing Bercouli around for a while.
• Villains Want Mercy: As soon as things go south, he's reduced to a blubbering wreck who begs for his life.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: A rare villainous example. Typically he derogatorily refers to the Integrity Knights via their numerical designations. When Alice defects and holds him at sword point, with his life on the line he finally refers to her as "Alice" to try and appease her.
• You Have Failed Me: He plans on reprocessing the Integrity Knights (or at least Bercouli and Fanatio) after seeing Bercouli fail to defeat Eugeo.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Quinella has no qualms with tossing aside Chudelkin's lifeless corpse after Kirito offs him.

Glowgen Defense Systems

In General

A US-based company that was hired by the National Security Agency to assault the Ocean Turtle to obtain the Soul Translator technology secretly developed there.

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• Anime Accent Absence: They are supposed to be Americans, but speak perfect Japanese.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: They're all comprised of criminals. Captain Dario Ziliani remarks that (with the exception of Gabriel Miller), none of the Glowgen operatives had any sense of discipline.
• Eagleland: Given that they're the antagonists in Alicization, it's the boorish variety. They're also Americans.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Villain example. The three main faces of the group could be seen to have this dynamic.
  • Gabriel is the Fighter, being the Physical God who relies on aggressive We Have Reserves tactics against the Human Army. He also is powerful enough to be a match for several heavy-hitters like Bercouli, Sinon (who's logged in as Solus), and a recently revived and empowered Kirito.
  • PoH is the Thief, being a Professional Killer who can sneak into the human encampment and kill several guards. He also later ambushes the Human Army and ALO players with his army of Chinese and Koreans.
  • Critter is the Mage, being The Cracker who hacks into the Ocean Turtle's system to log Gabriel and Vassago in. He even recruits and logs in foreign players to serve as Gabriel and Vassago's reinforcements.
• Gratuitous English: They slip a lot of English words into their dialogue as a way of showing they are not Japanese.
• He Knows Too Much: After the mission ends, Critter suspects the surviving team members are likely to be detained or even killed due to the American Government not wanting it to leak that they violated their treaty with Japan and led an attack on one of their facilities, as it could spark an international incident. This prompted Critter to steal a data-chip before the team escaped the Ocean Turtle with the intent of bargaining for his life.
• Hired Guns: They are mercenaries hired by the NSA to steal the STL technology, while the NSA get to keep their hands clean.
• Post-Final Boss: After the defeat and (seemingly for the latter) deaths of Gabriel and Vassago, the remaining mercenaries declare the mission a failure and attempt to blow up the Ocean Turtle before leaving. Though, one of them stays behind in hopes of avenging his partner. It takes the combined efforts of Kayaba in a robot body and Kikuoka to prevent the bomb from going off.
• Private Military Contractors: They operate in this way. It's a case of Truth in Television, as the GDS HQ is located in San Diego. In Real Life, there's a heavy presence of both the U.S. Navy's Point Loma base and U.S. Marine Corps Camp Pendleton in San Diego County. It means there are innumerable corporations ^note  (mainly related to industries like communications, biotech, and engineering) in the region with major Department of Defense contracts.
• Professional Killer: All of Glowgen's operatives specialize in assasinating people.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Vassago is the impulsive and hotheaded red to Gabriel's calmer and logical blue.
• Unskilled, but Strong: As experienced in assasination the operatives are, as Vassago himself remarks, they are no match for soldiers with formal training like the JSDF.

Gabriel Miller / Subtilizer / Vector

Gabriel Miller / Subtilizer (GGO, UW) / Vector (UW)

Voiced by: Akira Ishida (Japanese), Rie Kugimiya (Japanese, young), Ted Sroka (English, Alicization), Greg Chun (English, War of Underworld), Amanda Céline Miller (English, young), Sergio Gutiérrez Coto (Latin American Spanish)

^{Click here to see Vector}

^{Click here to see Gabriel's Angel of Death form}

"I wonder how it tastes. Your emotions, memories, heart and soul... everything! I'll devour them all now!"

Chief Technological Officer of "Glowgen Defense Systems" and son of the founder and former CTO. During the events of the Alicization arc, he leads a 12-men team of operators, at the request of the National Security Agency, on an assault of the Ocean Turtle.

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• 0% Approval Rating: Despite his status as the strongest being there, which dictates that they follow him unquestionably, none of the Dark Territory members seem to actually like him or are genuinely loyal to him. Shasta and Lipia die trying to kill him, Fu Za stopped Shasta out of a personal grude as opposed to loyalty, Dee Eye Ell has plans to usurp his authority, Kosogi thinks he's being manipulated by Dee Eye Ell and uses Loophole Abuse in regards to his orders, Lilpilin is angered when he orders 3,000 of his people dead for a spell, and Iskahn is disgusted by his We Have Reserves mentality enough to betray him himself and even before that he was rooting for Shasta when he made an attempt on his life. In addition, Vassago, his right hand, proves to be even more insane than he is. As when he threatens Kirito that he'll torture and kill everyone in Underworld, he includes Gabriel and his own armies in them.
• Achievement In Ignorance: He has no idea how he managed to consume Lipia's FluctLight, but he doesn't care and is delighted nonetheless.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Downplayed. The Light Novel depicts him as somewhat Unskilled, but Strong, due to lacking much skill in swordsmanship but compensating for that with the Vecta account's stats and Power of the Void, something which is Lampshaded by Bercouli during their duel. In the Anime however, he's depicted as being much more skilled with the Vecta account's sword and Bercouli's observation on his lack of swordsmanship prowess is adapted out.
  • Weird Zig Zag, with two scenes swapping his reactions to certain events. When he presented Lipia's head to lure out the treasonous general, he actually displayed concern when Shasta attempted to kill him and turned into a murderous tornado, trying to strategize a way out before determining there is none. Later on in his fight with Bercouli, he's noted to have a completely expressionless face when Bercouli finally kills him with the Uragiri, dying with nary a sound. In the anime, his reactions to both of these are swapped, with him keeping a straight in the face of Shasta's charge yet displaying surprise and even howling in pain when killed by the Uragiri.
  • Despite not killing any of the UW characters in Last Recollection, Gabriel's credibility as the Big Bad and Final Boss has cranked up, having two new, powerful, and way more dangerous transformations that he used against the heroes after his "True Gabriel" form is defeated.
• Adaptational Jerkass: As much of a bastard he is in the light novels, he actually manages to be worse in the anime, having a penchant for rape that was never present in the light novels.
• Adaptational Wimp: Downplayed in Last Recollection, since Gabriel is still a well-trained soldier and GGO's legendary pro gamer but he's nowhere near as unstoppable as he was in canon: He didn't kill any of the UW characters (though he did brainwash the Dark Territory natives into fighting the Integrity Knights) and his Vecta account was killed too soon by Kirito (though it's still a minor inconvenience for him). Even after logging back to UW as Subtilizer, he immediately transformed to his "True Gabriel" form when confronted again by the heroes at the Obsidia Castle. That said, Gabriel compensates this by having two extremely strong transformations, which makes him a lot harder to kill even with the heroes having six Physical Goddesses on their side.
• An Arm and a Leg: During their fight, Sinon's final attack destroys his arm in addition to the XM500 he generated. He temporarily replaces it with one made of pure energy for his final duel with Kirito.
• Animal Motifs:
  • In his introductory chapter, Dario Giulani, the captain of the USS Jimmy Carter, the sub that would transport Gabriel's forces right before the Ocean Turtle raid, describes him as having hollow eyes that "devoured all light like a bottomless pit" like the great white shark that he encountered while he was swimming in Miami. Considering the type of person Gabriel is, this is fitting.
  • He also has a minor link with insects; his interest in the soul was born out of curiosity over his father's insect collection and a insect's strange ability to survive things like getting their heads bitten off, wondering where their souls could be. The first opening for War of Underworld also shows him at a desk with a frame of frozen butterflies behind him.
• Anime Accent Absence: Despite being an American, his Japanese is perfect. In fact it is his Gratuitous English which has a Japanese accent.
• The Anti-God: As the Dark God Vecta, he is this to Goddess of Creation Stacia. In the mythology of Underworld, Vecta was the one god who was not created by Stacia, being a sentience who was birthed from the darkness itself and opposed Stacia, envying her power. He also became the reason why humans die, as he steals their lives over time, effectively making him The Grim Reaper, but his origins also make him effectively Satan.
• Arch Angel Gabriel: Named Gabriel while having a backstory and personality painting him as a Satanic Archetype, making him a Fallen Angel so to speak. He even takes on an angelic Humanoid Abomination form when he goes One-Winged Angel, where he gains a dark shadowy form with six wings and a halo.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • To Alice. The man dedicates himself to capturing Alice's soul and having it for himself while being at the forefront of the Dark Territory's attack on the Human Empire, which Alice fought so hard to protect. It becomes very personal for Alice when he kills Bercouli, the closest thing Alice had to a father.
  • To Sinon. Ever since he delivered a Curb-Stomp Battle and brutally killed her in the 4th BoB, Sinon has been haunted by dreams of him. Defeating Subtilizer becomes almost as big of a priority to her as defeating Death Gun. Likewise, Gabriel sees Sinon as worthy prey and too desires her soul for his taking.
  • Interestingly, this is averted with Kirito. The two never develop this sort of relationship due to how late Kirito was in participating in the war. The two of them do not even know each other when they finally meet face-to-face, and have never gained any personal hatred towards one another. To Kirito, Gabriel is merely the threat that needs to be stopped, while Gabriel views Kirito as just another insect for him to squash. This makes him one of the few Big Bads who does not develop this dynamic with Kirito.
• Artificial Limbs: After Sinon blows off his right arm (along with his rifle), he temporarily replaces it with one made of dark, multicolored- energy, although it doesn't always stay solid, often morphing into a lash of sorts.
• Ax-Crazy: Hands down the biggest example in the series. Hands down. Not even the Laughing Coffin, an organization dedicated to Player Killing, at their most terrifying reaches to his level of derangement. To put it into perspective, whilst Vassago's kills number in the triple-digits, the vast majority of them were done in SAO. Gabriel had already committed his first murder when he was still a child, and it only progressed from there, such as "experimenting" on as much as more than 100 people in real life to satisfy his curiosity of the human soul.
• Badass Boast: Makes one during his fight with Kirito.
  I am the one who reaps. The one who steals all heat, all life, all existence. I am the abyss.
• Bad Boss: He has little regard for the lives of his forces and will do anything to get what he wants, including killing anyone who questions him both in UW and in the real world. When Gabriel leaves the Dark Territory forces at the mercy of the American players he invited, they pull an Enemy Mine with the Human Empire.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: His childhood experiments on insects.
• Barehanded Blade Block: Admittedly, one of the most impressive examples in fiction. When Bercouli tries attacking him with the suspended slash generated from his initial strike like he did with Eugeo in their duel, Gabriel is able to sense it and slam his hands together to stop it and absorb its Incarnation, the only damage being to the Vecta account's crown.
• Battle Cry: During his fight with Kirito, he's eventually reduced to screaming "NULL!" as a reflection of his empty nature.
• Big Bad: After Quinella is defeated, he takes over this role for Alicization.
• Black Eyes of Crazy: When he's using Incarnation, the whites in his eyes turn a pitch black, which, combined with his natural Icy Blue Eyes, makes him go from looking intimidating to outright demonic.
• Break the Haughty: After spending the entire Arc as an Invincible Villain who causes the death of thousands of Artificial Fluctlights for his own ends, even personally killing Bercouli, his response to being Dragged Off to Hell by his previous victims is to drop his generally emotionless visage and scream in terror, begging for his forces to save him from his fate.
• Brought Down to Badass: Even after Bercouli pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to take out his Vecta Avatar, he's still a massive threat even when using the comparatively weaker Subtiliser Avatar due to his powerful Incarnation.
• The Caligula: As the Dark God, Emperor Vecta, Gabriel is an atrocious Bad Boss who, instead of relying on his IRL mercenary leader experience, seems content with just sending waves of his troops at the enemy out of the arrogant belief that the human army will be overwhelmed easily, and he has no qualms with having Dee Eye Ell sacrifice 3,000 Orcs to power a Death Worm Curse and using his remaining forces as bait for the Human Army and the American Players Critter summons to capture Alice in the commotion.
• Call-Forward: He shows up in Fatal Bullet, being revealed to be the mastermind behind Lievre's Evil Plan. He teases the Alicization arc, where he mentions that the entire incident was to collect data on noteworthy players and that the "rabbit" would light the way to Wonderland before promising Alice he'd see her again.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Invoked. When he logs in as Vecta, he hypes up the Dark Territory forces and rallies them behind him with a speech about how he'll lead them in laying waste to the Human Empire, killing everyone there and plundering it for all it's worth. Though seeing as he later describes himself as something akin to a Grim Reaper during his fight with Kirito, he probably plays this straight as well.
  "Blood and terror. Flames and destruction. Death and screams."
• Challenge Seeker: Implied. For both the 1st and 4th BoBs, he entered with some form of handicap that should realistically put him at a disadvantage, entering the former armed with only a pistol and knife, and the latter completely unarmed and instead stealing weapons from the other participants via his Army Combatant ability. These, however, do nothing to stop him from curb-stomping the competition.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Before blowing themselves up, Sinon told Kirito of the outcome of the first Bullet of Bullets tournament where it ended in a tie because the person who should have won got caught off guard. This is further explained under Taking You with Me.
• The Chessmaster: As Vecta, he is quick to take advantage of the Dark Territory's conditioning to follow the "Rule of the strongest" for his own ends, using them all as cannon fodder to overwhelm the Human Army and use them as bait so he can capture Alice just as he has his IRL allies summon American Players to hold them off from pursuing him.
• Cold Sniper: During his fight with Sinon, he responds to her turning Solus' bow into her PGM Hecate by turning his crossbow into a XM 500 Anti-Material rifle.
• Combat Tentacles: He can manifest shadowy tentacles for battle.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • To Sugou. Both are Mad Scientists who come from privileged backgrounds, and are obsessed with a girl including one they were betrothed to. Both end up using super accounts with godlike powers, and both are Godhood Seekers who desire to trap people in virtual worlds. The difference however is Sugou declared himself god of the world he had stolen, but is firmly dependant on his admin powers and is otherwise completely useless when stripped of them while being reduced to a blubbering wreck. Gabriel by contrast really only needed the Vecta super account to command the Dark Territory, and is otherwise Strong and Skilled no matter which avatar he uses or world he is in, as his Incarnation is so overwhelmingly powerful that he may very well be a true god when he is in the Underworld. In essence, while their motives and paths are very similar, Gabriel is a far more competent version of Sugou. If Sugou is a false god, then Gabriel is the real deal.
  • To Quinella. Both are the main villains of the Alicization arc and both are physical gods. But while Quinella was a tyrannical ruler of Underworld, Gabriel seeks to invade Underworld and become its new ruler. And while Quinella is one of Kirito's most personal enemies and isn't an obvious Evil Counterpart to him, Gabriel is very much another Evil Counterpart to Kirito and had no personal relation to the boy at all.
• Cool Sword:
  • His sword as Dark God Vecta looks especially impressive, being a One-Handed Zweihänder with a cross-guard in the shape of a cross with a ring around it and a blue jewel imbedded in the pommel. It's also powerful enough to match Bercouli's Time-Splitting Sword.
  • When he logs back into the Underworld as Subtilizer, his combat knife is converted into a large sword, called the Nihlism Blade in Rising Steel, that he uses against Kirito.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Even more so than Sugou. Gabriel's willing to kidnap and murder innocent people if it means finding about the nature of the soul.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Any battle involving him is bound to go in his favor. Case in point, in the first BoB tournament, he won bringing only a knife and a handgun with him, whilst in the fourth, he won bringing nothing with him, instead stealing weapons from his opponents. The only people who were able to stand up to him were Bercouli and Kirito. Justified in GGO as he's an experienced soldier in real life and thus can apply real-life tactics from the battlefield into the game.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: He was living a very comfortable life with his wealth and would have had a lot of monetary gain from completing the mission to the NSA to deliver Alice and the STL technology, but he's more interested in capturing her for himself and enjoying her soul, as well as creating his own world using the stolen STL tech where he's basically god.
• Dark Is Evil: In contrast to Kirito's Dark Is Not Evil. He plays this more straight than any other villain, being Vecta the darkness-based God of Evil, as well as having the Power of the Void.
• Death by Irony: Gabriel is left for dead by an Invincible Hero and ends up being Dragged Off to Hell by the souls of the dead, with the person he killed in his younger years mocking him. Made doubly ironic in that the latter part is the first time he's ever been afraid, a feeling he's always enjoyed inspiring in others.
• Die Laughing: He's arrogantly laughing as Kirito finishes him off, not considering the possibility that Kirito could actually beat him. He only stops after realizing he's having an out-of-body experience and is about to be Dragged Off to Hell.
• Dirty Coward: For all of his bragging about being an Invincible Villain or stealing souls, he screams and begs for his forces to save him when he gets Dragged Off to Hell.
• Dragged Off to Hell: His fate after being defeated.
• Dragon Rider: He rides a dragon when he captures Alice. Fortunately, Bercouli manages to catch up and shoot the dragon down.
• The Dreaded:
  • As Vecta, all of the residents of the Underworld are terrified of him, even the Dark Territory. Kirito himself is unnerved by him when they finally meet.
  • As Subtilizer, he is feared throughout GGO, especially Sinon who has been haunted by him.
• Earlybird Cameo:
  • He was alluded to in the Phantom Bullet arc as the co-winner of the first BoB.
  • He makes his first voiced appearance in the game-verse entry Fatal Bullet, as part of its Collapse of Balance DLC.
  • The anime features him in Episode 1 of Alicization, as leader of the squadron in GGO fighting against Sinon and the rest of the SAO gang. This is a whole two cours before he properly appears.
• Eagleland: The Boorish variety, and taken to the extreme.
• Enfante Terrible: Even when he was a child, him murdering his fiancée and experimenting on animals to satisfy his curiosity on the nature of a soul clearly paints that he's been pure evil since his youth.
• Ephebophile: Alice is one thing, but his partial obsession with Sinon is arguably creepier seeing as, while he's a 28 year old man, she's only 16 around the time they first met, something he suspected when he killed her in the BoB, yet he still tries to forcibly kiss her to "steal her soul" when they meet in the Underworld.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • To Eugeo. Both are blonde boys who lost their Childhood Friends when they were young and their lives were dictated by said loss from then on. However, while Eugeo was a poor Wood Cutter who truly cared for Alice and desired to save her, Gabriel was from a wealthy family and not only never truly cared for Alicia, just her soul, but he's also the one who killed her to begin with, with the belief that he saw her soul after he did turning him into a Mad Scientist Serial Killer who would kidnap people and experiment on them in hopes that he could experience what he did that day. Even their respective deaths mirror each other with them being Together in Death with said Childhood Friends, only Eugeo departs peacefully with Alice while Gabriel is Dragged Off to Hell by Alicia and the other people he's killed.
  • To Asuna as Stacia. Both of them dived into the Underworld as Physical Gods using Super Accounts, with the Dark God Vecta being built up as an Anti-God to Stacia. They have opposing goals of Asuna wanting to protect Alice and Gabriel wanting to capture her. However the biggest contrast is, Asuna's use of the Stacia account's godly abilities that allows her to turn the tides in the favor of the Human Empire, while Gabriel as Vecta is mostly an Orcus on His Throne with the usefulness of the account mostly just his ability to command the Dark Territory, with most of his fighting done with his Subtilizer account.
  • To Bercouli. Both are in charge of the Human Realm and Dark Territory respectively, both are god-like compared to most other folk, both assumed command of their forces very recently, and both make it their top priority to keep Alice out of the hands of the others. However, while Bercouli is a Frontline General who puts his own life at risk, Gabriel for a large part of the war was an Orcus on His Throne who left the fighting to his expendable army and doesn't get involved himself until Alice is in his grasp. While Bercouli is still very much human, Gabriel is a true Physical God thanks to his Vecta Super Account, with their fight being an extreme mismatch. While Bercouli was put in charge due to the death of Quinella, Gabriel abruptly showed up in the Underworld and stole command for himself while killing Shasta the Dark Knight Commander. Bercouli sees himself as a father figure to Alice and is willing to give his life to keep her safe and wants to reduce as much lives lost as possible, Gabriel only values Alice for the tasty soul which he wishes to indulge in and sends thousands upon thousands to their deaths to achieve his petty goal.
  • To Sinon. Both of them are The Ace in GGO and potential winners of the BoB as well as Cold Snipers, both lead unorthodox platoons, and both end up logging into the Underworld using Super Accounts to become Physical Gods. But of course, Sinon is fighting for the force of good and defending the Human Empire, while it is Gabriel who is undermining their efforts by bringing in foreign players as reinforcements. The two even Incarnate in their GGO guns and proceed to have a Sniper Duel to further invoke this parallel.
  • To Kirito, once he finally returns. Both end up being Physical Gods in the Underworld, not due to super accounts, but from their unparalleled Incarnations. Both have dark motifs, with Gabriel being Dark Is Evil to contrast Kirito's Dark Is Not Evil. While Gabriel plays up the Satanic Archetype, Kirito is placed as the Messianic Archetype who the people put their faith in to defeat Gabriel. Both of them end up losing an arm, but while Kirito Incarnates his arm back, Gabriel replaces it with a shadowy Artificial Limb. During their fight, while Kirito manifests Spriggan wings like for himself, Gabriel opts for bat-like wings. Finally, both took on alternate forms in the Final Battle, with Kirito Incarnating his Black Swordsman outfit while Gabriel goes One-Winged Angel and transforms into a shadowy Humanoid Abomination vaguely resembling an angel.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Even after seeing the powers of love and friendship on full display, he still sees people only as resources for him.
• Evil Is Bigger: Being a mercenary, Gabriel is large and solidly built, and this translates to when he logs in as Vecta, as Underworld Avatars share the real world aspects of their users. Justified since he's an American, who would be taller than your average Japanese man.
• Evil Overlord: As Vecta in Underworld.
• Evil Plan: Capture Alice and the Soul Translator technology, go into hiding in his Australian house, create his own VR world for him to rule as God, and kidnap and murder several people to trap in there as his "subjects" who he can abuse and torment as he pleases. Oh, and destroy the Underworld for good measure.
• Evil Tastes Good: Whenever he discusses souls, he tends to describe them as if they were food and even tends to use dining-related metaphors, such as him telling Sinon "Your Soul Will Be So Sweet" and comparing Bercouli's soul to a vintage wine during their duel.
• Eviler than Thou: As monstrous as Quinella was, Gabriel manages to be far far worse. It's to the point that what appears to Quinella's ghost appears to support Kirito when he confronts him.
• Face Death with Despair: Gabriel spends his last moments screaming and begging anyone to save him as the souls of all his past victims drag him off to Hell.
• Faux Affably Evil: During his meeting with the NSA, Gabriel seems to have a fairly normal, if businesslike, attitude, and Dario Giuliani remarks that Gabriel was well-behaved compared to his men on the Jimmy Carter. Anyone else who has encountered him knows that he's, in reality, a batshit insane, bloodthirsty, megalomaniacal sociopath.
• Foil:
  • To Vassago. See Vassago's folder on this page for more details.
  • To Quinella. While both became a Physical God of the Underworld and were Mad Scientists, they are otherwise polar opposites. Quinella wanted to preserve her rule over the Human Empire for all eternity, with a war against the Dark Territory or the destruction of the Underworld opposing her interests, while Gabriel actively pushed for the War due to seeing it as a means to acquire Alice and intended to destroy the entire Underworld once he had achieved his goals so he can remake it to his liking. The anime even further exemplifies this by having Quinella's spirit encouraging Kirito during his battle against Gabriel. While both are unable to understand the concept of love their resulting actions are very different, Quinella interprets love as attempting to control everything and making people her obedient dolls, while Gabriel only saw people for the delicious souls that resided inside them and has killed countless people to try and satiate his urges. Quinella was a Villain with Good Publicity revered as the benign Pontifex of the Human Empire and embodies Light Is Not Good, while Gabriel as Vecta was a God of Evil embracing Dark Is Evil and was despised by everyone and governed solely out of fear and the Taboo Index. Furthermore, both ended up losing their right arm to one of Kirito's friends before facing him in battle, with Quinella transforming her severed arm into a new weapon, while Gabriel manifested a new shadowy arm through Incarnation.
• Forced Sleep: His ability to suck in a person's Incarnation allows him to force people into unconsciousness. He uses this on Alice when he captures her.
• For Science!: He wants to learn about the secrets of the soul through any means necessary, and is willing to kill innocents to perform this research. Even his childhood love interest is no exception, since he believes someone like her must have a high quality soul.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: He started out as a a typical, if privileged child. Then his father showed him a video that depicted a male preying mantis living after being decapitated post-coital, and things just escalated from there.
• Genius Bruiser: For a deluded Serial Killer, he's fairly knowledgeable in quantum physics, being able to have rudimentary understanding of how the Soul Translator works entirely on his own. He's also quite possibly VR's World's Strongest Man period.
• Godhood Seeker: His end goal is to steal Alice's lightcube to place her in a virtual world of his own design. Afterwards, he plans on kidnapping real world people, killing their physical bodies, and placing their souls in his virtual world too, all so he can manipulate their souls as he sees fit. He even boasts himself as one during his fight with Kirito.
• God-Emperor: As Vector, he is this for the Dark Territory.
• Godlike Gamer: Regarded as the most legendary player of GGO and his reputation really shows with just how invincible he is on the battlefield.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: In contrast to Kirito’s translucent streamlined Spriggan wings, Gabriel manifests demonic bat-like wings.
• Heroic Willpower: Villainous Inversion. The reason that Gabriel is such an Invincible Villain is because of his great deal of willpower, which is the result of his delusional belief of his power to take souls and his great pride in his abilities^note  It's established that in the Underworld, self-confidence can affect the power of the individual and Gabriel establishes himself multiple times as a pretty much a Smug Snake. Even after losing the Vecta account, which for all intents and purposes should be more powerful, he remains a large threat with just his Subtilizer avatar as his powerful incarnation allows him to mimic the Vecta account's abilities to an extent, generate powerful weapons like an Anti-Material rifle, and take on a One-Winged Angel form to fight Kirito.
• Hero Killer: He kills Bercouli during the UW war.
• Hypocrite: When Iskahn introduces himself as the head of the Pugilist's guild, Gabriel expresses silent bewilderment at the idea of a faction of unarmed combatants existing. Bear in mind that this is the same guy who just recently entered the Fourth BoB completely unarmed, yet still came out the victor. Granted, he partially got by through stealing his opponent's weapon, but he hardly has much room to wonder why someone would enter combat unarmed, especially in a fantasy influenced VR world where he's just logged in as a Physical God.
• I Control My Minions Through...: Power with a pinch of Divine Right. Really, Gabriel possesses no qualities that would make him a leader anyone would display genuine loyalty to, considering his We Have Reserves mentality, reliance on Zerg Rushes that only serve to get his troops killed with little to show for it, and just generally being a Bad Boss. Fortunately for him, he logged into the Dark Territory as their Physical God, Vecta, making him naturally stronger than everyone there, no doubt helped by his IRL military and fighting experience, and that fact that he effortlessly killed a member of the Council of Ten after they ended up killing three other members and injured another trying to get to him. This makes it so that, whether they like it or not, the Dark Territory has to follow him due to how they were raised and the Seal of the Right Eye keeping them stuck in this mindset, and at most have to work around orders they don't agree with via Loophole Abuse.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: Inverted. Part of what makes Gabriel so dangerous is that he's an experienced soldier and as such can apply real-life tactics in the VRMMOs that he plays.
• Icy Blue Eyes: His eyes are described as devouring all light. Also doubles as a Red Right Hand as it indicates of his sociopathic character.
• I'm a Humanitarian: He rips out Kirito's heart and eats it in an attempt to reap his soul. This works against him when Kirito places razors in his heart.
• Inexplicably Awesome: In the Anime, he displays an amazing amount of skill in swordsmanship, in spite of the fact that he mainly played GGO and didn't rely on anything resembling a sword, the closest being his combat knife.
• Instant Expert: Despite first having to use them when he gets into his first actual fight in the Underworld, and it's against Bercouli of all people, he picks up on the use of Vecta's abilities and Incarnation relatively quickly, allowing him to nearly deliver a Curb-Stomp Battle to Bercouli before being killed by the Uragiri. When he logs back in as Subtilizer, he's basically mastered the latter, being able to Psychic Strangle a waiting Sinon, turn his cross-bow into an Anti-Material Rifle, create a shadow tentacle to replace the arm he loses to Sinon, and take on a One-Winged Angel form in his fight with Kirito.
• Invincible Villain: Gabriel is by and far the toughest out of all the antagonists. Across his appearances, he has been steamrolling over nearly every member of the main cast, even those with super-accounts, whether via proxies such as PoH or by himself. Ironically, Gabriel ends up being outclassed by Kirito despite giving him the toughest fight of his life. Fittingly, he served as the Final Boss of the original web novel series.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: He's established to be an uncaring sociopath who sees his soldiers, both in the real world and UW, as disposable pawns. The only time he comes across as sympathetic is his flashback of his Childhood Friend Romance with Alicia, and he even seems to be sad that she has to move away and endure a life of poverty. This sympathetic moment is soon negated when he decides that he doesn't want Alicia to belong to anyone but him, leading him to kill her and revel in the beauty of her soul. In the end, his "love" for Alicia is really just selfish possessiveness over her soul.
• Jerkass: He's nothing but a ruthless asshole.
• The Juggernaut: Very few people have ever managed to lay a finger on him, and any fight involving him turns into a Curb-Stomp Battle with him on the giving end, with only Bercouli and Kirito being able to put up a fight with him.
• Just a Kid: He thinks that Sinon and Kirito are nothing more than just "brats." Unfortunately for him, the latter is NOT someone who should be taken lightly.
• Karmic Death: Following his defeat at the hands of Kirito, the souls of his victims were freed and drag him away.
• Kick the Dog:
  • In his youth, experimenting on animals, killing his fiancée when he was a child because he believed her soul would lose its brilliance.
  • Puts Lipia Zankale's decapitated head on display after killing her. This sends Viksul Ur Shasta into an Unstoppable Rage and he tries to kill him, though his efforts proved futile.
  • The first thing he does upon returning the the Underworld as Subtilizer is to mock Bercouli for sacrificing his life to stop him as Vector.
• Knight of Cerebus: SAO was already a dark series as is but Gabriel's introduction makes everything in the series even more serious.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Despite his partial obsession with Sinon and that fact that she very clearly pissed him off after destroying his arm and XM500 in addition to charring his face, he decides to cut his losses and take advantage of the fact that she can no longer use Solus' Flight ability to continue pursuing Alice.
• Lack of Empathy: He cares for nothing but getting the first fully-functional artificial intelligence (i.e. Alice) all for himself, and that's before taking into account all the numerous atrocities that he did before getting to her, such as experimenting on animals to find the nature of the soul, killing his fiancé (the former two of which he did when he was a child), and leading people he manipulated to their deaths in the Underworld.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: One of his abilities as Vecta allows him to induce this in people by sucking in their Incarnation. In his fight with Bercouli, he's able to cause the Integrity Knight to suffer brief moments of amnesia in order to make up for the skill gap between them, even using it to cut off his arm.
• Lean and Mean: As Subtilizer, he has a thin build compared to his real life counterpart. He is also arguably the most sadistic and ruthless character in the entire series.
• Lust: Obviously towards Alice and souls but it's ultimately under a greater lust: a lust for power.
• Mad Scientist: Even worse than Sugou. If Sugou forcing people into mind control experiments was bad enough, Gabriel kidnaps innocent civilians and murders them in his "experiments" to learn the nature of the soul.
• Manipulative Bastard: He's quick to take advantage of his status as a Physical God, and in turn the strongest being, to make the Dark Territory follow him, promising them the plunder of the Human Realm when in reality he plans to destroy the Underworld after he gets Alice, them included. He later has Critter summon American VR players with the claim that the Underworld is a Beta-Test for a new VR game, saying that they can kill all the NPCs they want, so he can capture Alice in the ensuing confusion and make his escape.
• Mask of Sanity: He's a sociopath with a sick obsession with possessing and consuming souls, but manages to pass himself off as a cold, rational leader. His batshit insanity really comes to light during the final fight with Kirito.
• Master of All: Implied. In the 4th BoB, he entered unarmed and got by solely by stealing weapons from his opponents for his own use, suggesting that he's quite confident in his ability to wield different types of firearms.
• Master Swordsman: A part of his Adaptational Badassery in the anime. Despite primarily handling guns and at best a knife in GGO, Gabriel proves to be an exceptional swordsman too, managing to overwhelm Bercoui and later Kirito in melee combat.
• Maou the Demon King: As Dark God Vecta, Gabriel is the ruler of the Dark Territory and all the demi-humans and black iums who reside there, and uses their collective desire to invade and ravage the Human Empire as a pretext to start the War of Underworld in order to capture Alice. Along with this level of authority, and a high Object Control Authority and System Control Authority that allows to user to become a powerful Magic Knight, the account gives the user the power to suck in another's Incarnation with various debilitating effects, such as Laser-Guided Amnesia or Forced Sleep. And even after the avatar is killed and Gabriel switches to Subtilizer, he is able to mimic these abilities with his own Incarnation and even expand on them to do things like Life Draining, creating Combat Tentacles, and taking a One-Winged Angel form.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Has two: his GGO name, Subtilizer, which means "thief" in French, and the Japanese version of his GGO name "魂を盗む者", which means "The one who steals souls".
  • This even extends to his real name, Gabriel was one of God's archangels, while here he's a Satanic Archetype which would make him a Fallen Angel who defied God.
• Mighty Glacier: Bercouli summarizes his unrefined sword fighting style as Vecta as this; he hardly ever moves from his spot, yet blocks every strike sent at him despite his lack of a proper stance, and his return strikes are extremely powerful due to being a Physical God while his ability to induce Laser-Guided Amnesia creates openings for him to exploit, leaving Bercouli with little defensive options. In contrast, the Anime depicts him as a more Strong and Skilled proactive Lightning Bruiser.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: When Alicia is being forced to move after her family became victim to a financial crisis, he concluded that the best solution is to kill her to prevent her soul from being "tainted" by any new people she could meet.
• Near-Villain Victory: He manages to outmaneuver the Human Empire Army with his elaborately effective Uriah Gambits, have PoH drive the heroes back into a corner by inviting thousands of Chines and Korean players into the underworld and exploit their hatred against the Japanese for all its worth (though unaware that it puts himself and his army at as much risk with just how unhinged PoH is), and would've won by capturing Alice if it weren't for Kirito's last-minute mental recovery.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: If Subtilizer's meanings are of any indication, it gives an insight on to the inner workings of his mind.
• Not So Stoic: During his final fight with Kirito, Gabriel's Mask of Sanity breaks apart, revealing what he truly is: a batshit insane megalomaniac who's truly off his rocker.
• Oh, Crap!: He actually looks surprised, shocked even, when Bercouli uses the Uragiri to kill him as Vecta.
• Omnicidal Maniac: In his words, if he succeeds in capturing Alice, he'll blow up UW and its people next. The only one who tops him in this is his partner in crime Vassago, who also wants to kill off the demon army he lords over, and himself by proxy, all For the Evulz and then some just to spite Kirito and friends.
• One-Man Army: In GGO, he was able to take on a bunch of players using only as little as a knife and a handgun, to just nothing at all, thanks to his Combat Skill, "Army Combatative", which allows him to grapple his opponent and steal their weapon before they can react and use it against them.
• One-Winged Angel: While fighting against Kirito, Gabriel transforms into a pitch-black Eldritch Abomination with a pair of glowing blue eyes, a dark halo, and three pairs of angelic wings.
• Physical God: As Vector, especially in his One-Winged Angel form.
• Playing with Syringes: What he did to insects when he was a child to learn more about the nature of souls.
• Power Born of Madness: In a world powered by Imagination-Based Superpower, Gabriel's incredible insanity is the secret to his godlike power, granting him an unrivalled Incarnation.
• Power Copying: He displays a very high degree of mimicry, taking the abilities of opponents after simply observing them.
  • Seeing Sinon use Incarnation to transform Solus' bow into her PGM Hecat, he does the same and transforms his crossbow into a XM500 Anti-Material rifle, where the two proceed to have a Sniper Duel.
  • Observing Kirito having manifested his ALO Spriggan wings, he absorbs his flying Spider Tank to manifest giant bat-like wings, even telling Kirito he stole it from the boy.
• Power Nullifier: His "Darkness of the Void" functions like this, being capable of absorbing an enemy's Incarnation and negating the power they were about to use on him.
• Power of the Void: His "Darkness of the Void", which sucks in a person's willpower and Incarnation with varying effects, like inducing unconsciousness and causing brief memory relapses.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Despite her now being vulnerable with her legs destroyed and Solus' Flight ability now unusable, he decides that he's wasted too much time on Sinon and continues his pursuit of Alice, even after Sinon tries egging him on.
• Promoted to Playable: He is a playable character in several mobile games;
  • In Memory Defrag he is a playable unit called "[Cruel Spirit] Subtilizer" which has him paired against GGO Sinon and the two engaging in a Sniper Duel.
  • In Rising Steel, Gabriel becomes playable in the "Angel of Death" Scout as a Dark Elemental Break Unit with an Enhance Mode.
• Psychopathic Manchild: While he never displays any behavior that would suggest this, the fact that his power to see souls and consume them in the Underworld stems from the delusional belief that he's actually capable of doing just that and that he's had this belief since childhood and has never grown out of it certainly implies that he is one.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The Vecta account comes equipped with black armor and cape combo with red coloring to them, and its user is perhaps the nastiest villain in the series.
• Red Right Hand: The right arm he creates to replace his missing one during his final duel with Kirito is made of pure dark energy.
• Sadist: Even worse than the Laughing Coffin (or any villain before him, for that matter). He began studying the concept of mortality when he was a kid by killing his childhood friend Alicia Klingerman, and as he grew up capture, experiment on and then kill innocent civilians for "research" onto souls. And as Vector, the dark god of Underworld, he tortured even more souls (artificial ones, but no less satisfying to him). His prime goal in Underworld though to hunt down Alice - who resembles Alicia - and torture her as well.
• Satanic Archetype: His obsession with souls easily parallels the Faustian depictions of Satan, his Chessmaster abilities parallel some contemporary depictions of Satan as a sophisticated, Machiavellian smooth-talker a la The Rolling Stones's depiction of the Devil from Sympathy for the Devil, and, as Vector, he's a God of Darkness with an Eldritch Abomination true form who leads an army of demihumans and monsters like the traditional depictions of Satan. To finish it off, considering that Alicization was the last arc in the original web novel series and the Book of Revelation is the last book of the Bible, if Gabriel is Satan then Kirito is the Messiah who ultimately defeats Satan in the Final Battle.
• Serial Killer: Given that he's "experimented" on as much as a hundred people in real life since his youth, this gives him one of the highest bodycounts in the series.
• Situational Sword: Downplayed. In Rising Steel as [Angel of Death] Subtilizer, his Incarnate Skill deals bonus damage against an enemy when their Incarnation is at 150% or over, meaning it can only be used for optimum damage in when his opponent is charging an Incarnation Skill over a certain percentage.
• Skewed Priorities: Despite Alice making her way the World End Alter to escape him, he decides to take the time to torture Sinon and take her soul as well upon seeing and recognising her. This backfires on him, as not only does Sinon fight back and injure him, but she's able to delay him long enough to give Kirito and Asuna the chance to catch up to him and Alice, allowing the former to fight Gabriel while the latter helps Alice get to the alter.
• Slasher Smile: Rarely smiles, but there's a grim smile on his face in the whenever he's close to getting what he wants, such as getting Alice. It shows his true character.
• Sleeves Are for Wimps: As Subtilizer, he wears a black shirt that leaves his forearms bare, and he’s basically an Invincible Villain.
• Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: Quinella was already immensely overpowered compared to previous villains, but Gabriel cranks up the threat level in further by being a borderline Invincible Villain.
• Smug Snake: Gabriel fancies himself as The Chessmaster, but his overuse of risky strategies ends up getting his army killed for a fleeting to nonexistent tactical advantage, forcing him or his proxies such as PoH to to do the job himself. He's also very dismissive of all of his opponents and underestimates them greatly, which gets his Vecta account killed by Bercouli, gets him held up by Sinon long enough for Alice to reach the World's End Alter, and he even Dies Laughing out of arrogance when Kirito deals the final blow against him. His arrogance disappears the minute he realizes he's being Dragged Off to Hell, replaced by a coward who screams and begs for mercy.
• The Sociopath: A high-functioning one, and the most dangerous example in the series. Gabriel is charismatic, manipulative, and wickedly intelligent, even despite his batshit insanity, but is simultaneously utterly bloodthirsty and utterly devoid of anything remotely resembling empathy.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Thus far in the gameverse, he's still kicking seeing as the "War of Underworld" arc didn't unfold at all compared to canon, and Glowgen has yet to try to infiltrate the Ocean Turtle. It's to the point that Fatal Bullet, which so far is the latest main game in this alternate timeline besides mobile titles, has him appear in The Stinger for the DLC episodes setting up a future antagonist role.
• Spider Tank: He gets a flying platform variation of this when he logs back in as Subtilizer. He states that it was converted from a jetpack he owned in GGO.
• Spikes of Villainy: One of his pauldrons as Vecta has a horn-like spike protruding from it. He's also pure evil.
• Stalker with a Crush: To his Childhood Friend Alicia Klingerman, or more accurately her soul, to the point where he murdered her in cold blood when she was about to move away, believing that interacting with people other than him would taint her soul's brilliance. His attempts at capturing Alice during the War of Underworld is so that he can use her as a Replacement Goldfish, planning on making her the queen of the VR World he was planning to trap various other people's souls in.
  • Minor example in regards to Sinon. While his focus is largely focused on Alice, his internal narration has him displaying an interest in her after their encounter in the BoB due to believing that she has a strong soul, to the point that he expresses a desire to trap her in his planned VR world as well. Not helping matters is when Sinon, as Solus, confronts him when he logs back into the Underworld as Subtilizer, the way he interacts with her can come off as kind of rapey, with him using his Incarnation to restrain her and attempting to kiss her as the light drains from her eyes.
• The Stoic: Gabriel typically presents the front of a calm, collected, and rational leader and usually only raises his voice when commanding the Dark Territory army. However, this appears to largely be a Mask of Sanity.
• Strong and Skilled: Not only does he have a powerful Incarnation, he's as skilled as one would expect from a modern soldier, as shown in his GGO fights where he's an expert in using knives and firearms. He is also able to see the weaknesses in Aincrad's unarmed combat style, which puts Kirito at a disadvantage when fighting him this way. However, he's less skilled with swords and other weapons that generally aren't used in modern warfare.
• Taking You with Me: He was on the receiving end of this during the Japanese GGO server's first Bullet of Bullets tourney (the one where he participated with only a pistol and knife). He got blown up by the last surviving player when the latter pulled out and activated a plasma grenade as a "Screw You!" move.
• Tears of Fear: The "spirit" of Alicia really set off the waterworks when she chose to banish him.
• Tempting Fate: During his fight with Kirito, he displays absolute certainty in his Invincible Villain status and believes that Kirito won't be able to beat him, even mocking him as Kirito deals a blow powered by the prayers of everyone in the Underworld. Not only does he lose, he ends up dying and getting Dragged Off to Hell.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: His GGO avatar is noted to look very average, having a, while not ugly, plain face, typical blonde hair and blue eyes and a build that's not too thin but not too large either. This however serves to make him more unnerving.
• Tranquil Fury: It's easy to tell that he's pissed after Sinon destroys his XM500, blows off his arm, and burns his face with her final attack in their duel. Thankfully, he decides to go after Alice instead of continuing the fight.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Killing his friend Alicia Klingerman when he was still a child.
• Ugly All Along: Gabriel is usually handsome (if rather plain looking) whenever he’s The Stoic, only to show a truly hideous and grotesque face whenever he shows any emotions. Examples of his ugly face shown include smiling and laughing creepily whenever he gets what he wants and him screaming for help when being Dragged Off to Hell.
• Underestimating Badassery: Oh Gabriel, do you really think its a good idea to underestimate Kirito, just because you're a Physical God? You'll definitely regret it soon enough.
• Undignified Death: Among all the villains who’ve died, Gabriel death may possibly be the most undignified. Basically, he dies screaming for help as he’s Dragged Off to Hell by all of his victims, while all that’s left of Gabriel is his corpse, with its hideous and scared face shown exposed for all of his men to see.
• The Unfettered: He sees everyone, enemy and ally alike, as pawns or stepping stones to his goal.
• UltimateGamer386: Regarded as something of a legend in GGO, being a renowned player and one of the finalists of the first BoB along with the only player who Sinon has had no hope of beating (with the list including Kirito).
• Unskilled, but Strong: Zig-zagged. He possesses the skills and reflexes that one would naturally expect from a IRL mercenary, and while he does make use of them in the Underworld during his duel with Bercouli to dodge and even block his attacks, the Integrity Knight notes that he doesn't seem especially skilled in sword combat and is largely only able to have the edge due to the Vecta account's ability to suck in a person's willpower and Incarnation.
• Villain Ball: Despite being an IRL CSO of a Private Military Company, suggesting that he has a good deal of experience in combat and in leading troops, his initial attack is simply just him having the Demi-Human tribes rush the Human Army in a frontal attack with seemingly no attempt to learn who exactly he's dealing with or, which causes the initial attack to fail miserably and all but wipe out four of the tribes. It's only after this fails that he relies on smarter plans such as sacrificing Orc troops to power a dark magic spell that's for all intents and purposes a One-Hit Kill and using his remaining troops and a bunch of foreign players summoned by Critter to distract the Human Army so he can capture Alice in the commotion.
• Villainous Breakdown: As he's Dragged Off to Hell after being defeated by Kirito, he breaks down crying and weeping. He also demanding to know what he had done wrong, before screaming as he's absorbed into oblivion.
  Gabriel Miller: This is... This face is... It's mine. W-What... [...] S-Stop! Let go! Stop! Stop! S-Stop! Stop!
• Villain Respect: He seems to legitimately respect Kayaba as the creator of the revolutionary Full-dive technology, admitting that he would have spent millions to recruit him to Glowgen Defense System in spite of, even because of his criminal record.
• Villains Want Mercy: He begs for his men to save him as he's being dragged into oblivion when he's rendered powerless. Unfortunately for Gabriel, his pleas are ignored as he's banished to oblivion.... forever.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Generally Averted. Gabriel is such an Smug Snake that he views most obstacles as merely bugs for him to squash, and in the rare time that he does gain a degree of interest in an opponent, such as Bercouli, he will quickly grow bored and move to finish them so he continue with his plans. However, there are two notable exceptions to this.
  • Obviously, in Alice, which kickstarted when he first heard her name, which bore resemblance to that of his Childhood Friend Alicia's who he murdered, immediately making plans to go AWOL upon retrieving her to keep her to himself instead of handing her to the U.S. Her interest increases when he actually sees her in person due to her physical similarities to Alicia, prompting a Psychotic Smirk from him.
  • In his encounter with Sinon in the BoB, he's quick to display an interest in her as "prey", taking joy in predicating where she'd attempt to snipe at him from and ambushing her, using his "Your Soul Will Be So Sweet" Catchphrase before killing her. It's to the point that when he encounters her in the Underworld upon logging back in as Subtilizer, he decides to hold off on pursuing Alice to claim her soul, even when she fights back.
• We Have Reserves: For him, sacrificing his forces is no big deal. He even sacrifices 3,000 Orcs to power a One-Hit Kill Sacred Art and sets up his remaining forces to act as a bait for the Human Army while he captures Alice.
• Wicked Cultured: Despite his claims that the body is only a vessel for the soul, Gabriel has rather high-class taste. When we first meet him, he's dressed in a white shirt, grey slacks, and custom-made cordovan leather shoes, and waking up from a nap on an imported italian sofa, and his desk comes with a Norwegian reclining chair. Later on when fighting Bercouli, he feels compelled to compare his soul to a vintage wine, implying he's a connoisseur of sorts.
• Would Hit a Girl: A repeat offender. He murders his friend Alicia by stabbing her in the head, brutally kills Sinon in GGO with a chokehold, and strangles Lipia to death, just to name a few examples.
• Yandere: When his childhood friend Alicia is about to move away, Gabriel kills her in his mad belief that he can preserve the brilliance of her soul and keep anyone else from having her. In the present, he seeks Alice as a replacement due to their similar appearance and names, hoping that her soul will be just as brilliant.
• You Monster!: Several characters (like Shasta and Bercouli) have called him an inhumane and pure evil monster.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: His entire motive. He has no problems "stealing souls" from his victims to the point of attempting to claim Kirito's soul by cutting him in half and trying to eat his heart during their fight.
• Zerg Rush: His tactics can be summed up as throwing all the men at his disposal at the enemy on hopes of overwhelming them, with no concern how many of them die due to his We Have Reserves mentality.

Vassago Casals

See the Sword Art Online - Laughing Coffin page.

Critter

Critter

Voiced by: Isshin Chiba (Japanese), Jon Allen (English), René García (Latin American Spanish)

A hacker under the employ of Glowgen Defence Systems. Brought on the assault of the Ocean Turtle in order to hack the Soul Translator.

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• The Chessmaster: He orchestrates the syncing of Underworld and real world time. Then he advertises on forums in different countries and unwittingly recruiting an army of foreign players to Zerg Rush the Human Empire with almost none of them any the wiser to the truth.
• The Cracker: Critter is a criminal hacker and claims to have once hacked into the Pentagon, a claim Vassago uses to mock him when he fails to hack into the Ocean Turtle's network to get Alice's Lightcube.
• Dirty Coward: He's quick to flee when Brigg is killed and, while reluctant at first, he agrees to plant a bomb on the Ocean Turtle and kill everyone in it when threatened by Hans. He's also revealed to have stolen a data chip in hopes of talking the US out of killing him, with no indication that he's gonna bargain for his remaining teammates' lives.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Despite being a criminal, he's frightened by Vassago's true sadistic nature. Of all the Glowgen members, he's the only one shown to be reluctant to blow up the Ocean Turtle and kill all the Rath members, only relenting when Hans threatens to kill him.
• Evil Counterpart: His blonde hair, glasses and status as his group's computer expert makes him a rather obvious one to Higa.
• Evil Genius: He's The Chessmaster, Glowgen's resident hacker, and handles all of the technolgical side of the mission.
• Entertainingly Wrong: He pokes fun at Vassago for only knowing how to fire a gun in a game, insulting his skills as a mercenary. Unbeknownst to him, not only was Vassago the most infamous Player Killer in SAO, but before that he was Professional Killer for the Korean Mafia. This not only gives him potentially one of the highest body counts of any Serial Killer, but it goes without saying that his pre-SAO experience likely gave him firearms experience.
• Failed a Spot Check: When he notices that Vassago's body wasn't with Gabriel and Brigg's in the body bags, he realizes that he never confirmed whether or not he was dead when he found him and Gabriel, just assuming he was dead just by looking at him.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He's a hacker and mercenary who wears a pair of glasses. Vassago gives him the nickname "Four Eyes" as a result.
• Freak Out: Has a minor one when he realizes that Vassago might still be alive.
• Hypocrite: He pokes fun at Vassago for, at least from his perspective, not knowing how to actually fight due to being the "VR expert", but Critter himself is a Non-Action Guy who's only there to hack the Soul Translator and he was quick to flee when Brigg is killed, citing his own lack of combat skill as the reason.
• Non-Action Guy: Villainous example. While he is armed like the other mercenaries, Critter is the only member of the GDS forces to not do any actual fighting. His main role in the War of the Underworld is simply to log Gabriel and Vassago in as Vector and a Dark Knight and later as their personal accounts, Subtilizer and PoH, and to recruit foreign players from America, China and Korea via a false beta-test recruitment ad. He even Lampshades this when Brigg is killed, choosing to flee while going on about he's not a soldier.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: He and Vassago do not get along, the both of them making jabs at each other and almost coming to blows before Gabriel intervened.
• Underestimating Badassery: Despite being a Non-Action Guy, he doesn't have a very high opinion of Vassago. He views him as Dumb Muscle at best, and just a Miles Gloriosus who thinks his skill in simulation combat makes him a badass soldier in real life at worst. This leads to him being caught off guard when, after he calls into question the idea of logging in to search for Alice due to the possible language barrier, Vassago reveals himself to be fluent in Japanese. He's also likely unaware of the fact that he was SAO's most infamous Serial Killer. In the end, after catching a glimpse of his true nature and learning of his apparent escape from death, he's now thoroughly terrified of him and the possibility of his survival.

Hans and Brigg

Hans and Brigg

Hans Voiced by: Yasunori Matsumoto (Japanese), Ben Lepley (English), Gerardo Ortega (Latin American Spanish)

Brigg Voiced by: Yoji Ueda (Japanese), Kellen Goff (English), Héctor Moreno (Latin American Spanish)

Left: Hans, Right: Brigg

A pair of mercenaries who were partners long before being hired by Glowgen Defense System.

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• Adaptational Dumbass: Brigg shooting the time accelerator safety switch. In the Light Novel it was simply because he lost his temper and shot it after failing to pick the lock for it and losing a bet with Hans in the process. In the anime, shooting it was his first idea.
• Avenging the Villain: Hans tries to do this when Brigg is killed by trying to blow up the Ocean Turtle and staying behind so the bomb goes off. He fails.
• Bald of Evil: Brigg is shown to be evil and completely bald.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Doubles as Even Evil Has Loved Ones; these two men have apparently been working as partners for a while and have a good deal of comradery between them. It's to the point that Hans is willing to lay down his life to avenge Brigg when he's killed.
• Lethally Stupid: Kirito and Asuna probably wouldn't even be trapped in the Underworld for 200 years if Brigg didn't shoot the lock for the time accelerator safety switch. This breaks it and causing the time acceleration to reactivate.
• Oh, Crap!: Brigg's reaction when he notices Kikuoka shooting at him and Critter.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Downplayed. The both of them are mercenaries with little qualms with killing. However, Brigg is described as being The Brute and comes off as Dumb Muscle. Hans also is noted to be a bit of a dandy, having a soft face and a styled mustache.
• Taking You with Me: In order to ensure the Ocean Turtle is destroyed to avenge Brigg, Hans stays behind to prevent anyone from disarming the bomb.

Reinforcements (SPOILERS)

Foreign Players

Players from countries outside of Japan. They were summoned by Critter to act as reinforcements for Gabriel and Vassago. And they have no actual knowledge of what's going on.

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• Adaptational Heroism: In the anime, since everyone figures out that PoH's a Serial Killer, PoH instead opts on brainwashing them into killing each other instead of just spurning the Only Sane Men against those following their jingoism against Japanese players.
• The Cavalry: A villainous example. After most of the Dark Territory forces had been whittled out, these guys are sent in to continue pushing back the Human Empire.
• Eagleland: Of the "warmongering ignorant jerkass" variety. The first couple waves of the reinforcements are Americans whose are told about "a realistically violent VRMMORPG where you can kill whatever you want" and basically reacted with "where do I queue". Contrast with the Chinese and Korean players, who are sold a story about a multinational USA/CHS/KOR cooperative project that is suffering from Japanese hackers.
• Failed a Spot Check: As Moonphase points out, if PoH really was an admin like he claimed, then he could have easily dealt with the Japanese players himself by merely rebooting the system. However, none of them seem to pick up on this.
• Gratuitous English: They are all voiced by Japanese voice actors attempting to speak often broken English phrases in very obvious Japanese accents.
• Internet Jerk: Many of the Foreign players shown definitely give into their darker impulses, being borderline sadistic Blood Knights who enjoy every moment they spend killing the "Enemy NPCs". The Chinese and Koreans arguably take it further, since their summoning gives them a chance to let out a lot of their resentment towards the Japanese.
• Locked Out of the Loop: All of the factions in this group are outright lied to by Glowgen Defense Systems and PoH, believing the Underworld to be just be a regular VR Game and the Artificial Fluctlights they're killing to be mere NPCs.
• Obliviously Evil: They genuinely have no idea that their actions are helping an amoral group of mercenaries. Nor do they know most of the "NPCs" they're killing are actually Artificial Fluctlights who are basically no different from them.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: A played with example. When they're logged in, all of them are clad in heavy-looking red armor and black clothes beneath them. However, while they clearly don't present themselves as the pictures of morality, this is largely due to their "ignorance" of their situation and them being lied to. And some of them are shown to be morally sound.
• Secretly Selfish: It's Implied that while many of the Chinese and Koreans were genuinely oblivious to what was going on and actually started becoming suspicious the moment PoH started torturing Kirito, many others did suspect something was off. But they went along with it and never bothered questioning it since they saw it as an excuse to kill VR players from Japan (who they resented due to being denied access to the Seed Nexus).
• Unskilled, but Strong: Alice and some others note how disorganized and uncoordinated the armies as a whole are, and that they don't appear to be very skilled with the weapons they came with. However, not only do the red knight avatar they log in with have decent enough stats, but their sheer numbers makes them a massive threat to the comparatively small armies of the Human Empire, Dark Territory, and Japanese players.
• Unwitting Pawn:
  • Both the American players and later the Chinese and Korean ones become this for Glowgen Defense Systems. They were logged into the Underworld without being told the full truth, being told a lie that convinces them to fight the Human Army and be an effective decoy for Gabriel.
  • The Americans are told that the Underworld is a Beta-Test for a brand new VR Game and both the Human and Dark Territory Armies are experimental enemy NPCs that they are free to kill as they please.
  • The Chinese and Koreans are a bit more in the know, being told that an army of American Players are being dealt a Curb-Stomp Battle by an army of Japanese ones... and that's about all they know. They're never told that it's because the American themselves are being manipulated and that all the NPCs they're killing are being defended by the Japanese, instead being convinced that it's all a joint VR Project between America, Korea and China and that the Japanese players are hackers trying to ruin it.
• Walking Spoiler: There's a reason why their folder title warns of spoilers.
• Zerg Rush: In terms of combat power, they are vastly inferior to the Integrity Knights, Physical Gods, and even the Pugilists. However, they have the power in numbers advantage and prove to be a threat. This is because there's simply an endless number of them rushing in.