Kirishima Mai

Kirishima Mai (霧島 舞), known as Shirley (シャーリー) in Gun Gale Online (GGO), is a supporting character in the Gun Gale Online spin-off series. Mai is a twenty-four-year-old woman working as a nature guide and hunter in Hokkaido who, under the recommendation of her fellow hunters, began playing GGO as a way to refine her hunting skills. She joined the Northern Country Hunters Club (KKHC) squadron that her colleagues had created in the game and spent most of her time hunting monsters with them. Following the winter hunting season of 2026, Mai reluctantly agreed to participate in the second Squad Jam (SJ) with some of the other hunters who were available on the day of the tournament.

Gun Gale Online
Mai's Gun Gale Online avatar Shirley has the appearance of a woman in her late twenties with a bob cut hairstyle, dyed in a green reminiscent of fresh leaves, as well as the face of a neat and clean beauty. Shirley wears brown cargo pants, long boots, a black T-shirt on top, bulging due to her voluptuous breasts. In combat, she also equips a rather large magazine pouch on the right side of her waist belt and a ken'nata knife on the left side, as well as a Realtree-patterned jacket and a camouflaged baseball cap, worn backwards so that the cap's brim would not interfere with her sniping.

Background
Kirishima Mai was born in Tokyo but moved to Hokkaido at some point in her life. Ever since her childhood, Mai dreamed about working in nature, thus she spent her middle and high school years leading an active life. She spent most of her time camping, mountain climbing, horse riding and on other outdoor sports; even in university, Mai joined every single club that focused on outdoor activities. Due to the recommendation from a female senior in one of such clubs, Mai acquired a shotgun possession permit and hunting license at the age of twenty in order to go hunting. After graduating, Mai managed to fulfil her dream and become a nature guide, guiding tourists and mountain climbers through Mother Nature. This occupied her from spring till autumn; however, as the number of clients and her workload decrease in the winter, Mai spent the colder months of the year working as a Yezo sika deer hunter, selling the meat to metropolitan restaurants and thus being able to both enjoy her hobbies and earn some money from them. Due to her deer hunting work, Mai accumulated experience with firearms and, after three years of hunting with a shotgun, met the requirements to acquire a rifle.

One day, in the summer of 2025, one of her hunter colleagues recommended to play Gun Gale Online for shooting and hunting practice, thus a group of the younger hunters began playing the game, forming the Northern Country Hunters Club squadron after about two weeks of playing the game. As more and more of her younger associates began playing the game and unanimously praised it, Shirley also joined the game, despite never having played any virtual reality games or having any interest in them. Since GGO offered the players the ability to use a large variety of guns and shooting practice conditions, Shirley continued playing the game to refine her skills, using the monsters in areas similar to Hokkaido's terrain as animal hunting practice. Next winter, Mai was able to verify the effectiveness of training in-game when she noticed that her rate of one-shot clean kills of deer had significantly increased since the previous hunting season, causing her to feel glad about her decision to play the game.

However, to Mai's disgust, after the hunting season had concluded, one of her fellow hunter proposed the idea of the group participating in the Squad Jam tournament, despite their group having always avoided any player versus player combat till then. To an even greater shock, she learnt that all of her fellow hunters were very interested in the idea of testing their skills against people. When Mai questioned the ethicalness of killing people when they worked as hunters and discovered that the other hunters did not share her concerns, she momentarily considered distancing herself from her colleagues, before realising that their assistance was very valuable in her job. As such, the girl reluctantly agreed to participate in the tournament with the other hunters due to their incessant pleas.

Unknown to her colleagues, however, Mai had actually planned to not play any role in the battle, hoping that the team would fail in the preliminaries due to their lack of experience in player versus player combat, thus losing the motivation to participate in player versus player combat ever again. Yet, to Shirley's shock, her team was matched against a group of six photon sword-wielding players, making them easy targets for the snipers who were able to avoid the activation of the Bullet Line system. Thus, Shirley was forced to participate in the main tournament as well, where she planned to expose herself to danger and not contribute to the team's efforts in battle in order to leave the tournament as soon as possible.

Gallery

 * See Kirishima Mai/Image Gallery

Trivia

 * Mai's in-game name, Shirley, is based on a nickname her close friend had given her in middle school. The nickname was derived from her real name through an association: since the kanji for Mai's name (舞) shared a reading with the kanji for rice (米), her friend nicknamed her shari (舎利), the Japanese word for cooked rice. Mai was too embarrassed to be called by such a nickname in the real world but had no qualms with using it for her in-game name.
 * Mai uses a regular Blaser R93 for hunting in the real world.