Sinon

Shino Asada is a major character in the second season of Sword Art Online, and a player of the virtual reality MMOFPS Gun Gale Online. Shino played the game in order to overcome her phobia of both firearms and, to a lesser extent, men, stemming from an incident in her past. When she was in fifth grade, Shino and her mother were caught up in a bank robbery, where a man armed with a Type 54 handgun threatened the bank teller and shot him when he attempted to a sound an alarm. The man then took Shino's mother hostage. Shino's mother had been psychologically weak since she saw her husband and Shino's father die in a car accident two years earlier. Since then, Shino had become protective of her mother, and attacked the gunman, biting his hand and causing him to drop the handgun. Shino then seized the weapon and shot the man three times with his own gun, killing him with the third shot to the head at point blank range. When Shino turned to her mother, she simply stared in shock and horror at the whole event, and Shino realized she literally hand blood on her hands.

For years afterward, Shino was plagued by nightmares about the event, where her attacker returned from the dead and murdered her, as well as the previously mentioned phobia of guns, to the point where she could suffer a panic attack or even collapse simply by seeing a gun in a film or photograph. This made her a frequent target of bullies, who realized they could cause her to seize up simply by acting as though they are pointing a gun at her. Shino was introduced to VR gaming by Shinkawa Kyouji, who suggested it as a means of desensitizing her from her fear of firearms. Shino, under the screen named Sinon, became one of the most skilled players in Gun Gale Online, armed with her PGM Hecate II anti-material rifle.

In late 2024, Shino faces Kazuto "Kirito" Kirigaya in the "Bullet of Bullets" tournament, and ties with him for the winner, as well as aiding him in his investigation of the "Death Gun", a mysterious player who wielded as weapon supposedly capable of killing a person in real life from within the game. It is later revealed that the "Death Gun" murders are the work of Kyouji and Shouichi Shinkawa, one of whom would control the avatar of the character, and the other would kill the person in real life through the injection of a paralytic directly into the heart. Kyouji attempts to murder both Kirito and Shino in this manner after Shino refuses his advances, and almost succeeds with Kirito, if not for him still wearing a metal electrode from while he was in the VRMMO from within a hospital under close monitoring, on his chest, which blocked the injector. Shino then subdues Kyouji and both Kyouji and Shouiji are subsequently arrested for their crimes.