Shinkawa Shouichi

Shinkawa Shoichi (新川 昌一) is one of the 10,000 players who were trapped in «Sword Art Online» where he was infamously known as «Red-Eyed XaXa» (赤眼のザザ), a member of the infamous red guild: «Laughing Coffin». He later became a player of «Gun Gale Online» under the name Sterben (ステルベン). He is also the mysterious self-proclaimed «Death Gun», alongside his brother Shinkawa Kyouji and Kanemoto Atsushi (Johnny Black), and is the main antagonist during the Phantom Bullet arc.

Sword Art Online Avatar
XaXa wears a skeletal mask and a black cape with a hood. He has the guild tattoo on one of his arms.

Gun Gale Online Avatar


Sterben's avatar in Gun Gale Online is similar to the one in Sword Art Online. Like his SAO avatar, Sterben wears a skeletal mask and also wears a dark optical camouflage mantle around him. He re-tattooed a half-opened coffin with an arm sticking out of inside, waving; the manga version of the emblem of «Laughing Coffin».

Personality
Shoichi is a cold and sadistic person who believes in PoH's principles, thus he enjoys killing other players, even knowing that they would be killed in real life as well. It was later revealed that Shoichi enjoyed killing other players because he enjoyed the feeling of being feared by others.

As Shoichi's father did not have any expectations for him due to him being frail and sick, he eventually dropped out of high school and turned to the Internet as his heaven and started playing MMORPGs until he was trapped in SAO where he committed various crimes, becoming a Player Killer one year after the game started and joining Laughing Coffin. Shoichi's sense of reality has been wearing thin since then, feeling that only things beneficial to him were real. After the death game had ended, under his brother's Kyouji's advice and started playing Gun Gale Online, however, instead of practising his skills against monsters, he spent time on the streets observing other players and imagining ways of killing them, while, after obtaining his mantle, he had been practising ways of obscuring himself from others, feeling that it was interesting to tail someone from behind. After he managed to find out the real life address of several players by tailing them when they were inputting their personal information in the presidential estate of SBC Gurokken, he and his brother came up with a plot to continue killing people in the real world, supposedly via the use of a «Death Pistol» in-game.

Background
When he was young, he was rather frail and sick, thus he was often moved between his home and the hospital after graduating middle school. He entered high school a year late but his father had already given up on him taking over the family business, thus he pushed the burden onto his younger brother. Shoichi eventually dropped out of high school and turned to the internet and started playing MMORPGs until he got trapped in Sword Art Online.

Aincrad Arc
XaXa was one of the top members in the red guild «Laughing Coffin». He was a master of the «Estoc Thorn Sword» that was bathed in the color of red. He holds a grudge against Kirito and the clearers that defeated Laughing Coffin in the anti-PK raid. He was also partners with Johnny Black, and together served as a combination where they poisoned and killed.

Phantom Bullet Arc
After an unknown time of counseling and observation, due to being an orange player, after being released from SAO, through the recommendation of his brother, Kyouji, he began to play Gun Gale Online. The two looked to another Laughing Coffin member and began to plot an ingenious plan to kill players in both the virtual world and the real world. He enters the Bullet of Bullets tournament under the name «Sterben» to prove his "true" killing ability to the rest of the world. He would stun people with special shells from his L115A3 Silent Assassin sniper rifle and then get up close to shoot them with his «Death Gun», a 7.62 X 25 handgun. While he committed the kill in-game, his brother and the other Laughing Coffin member would inject the players in the real world with a syringe filled with succinylcholine, which stopped the heart. They had obtained the address by hiding under a «Metamaterial Optical Camouflage» while they watched the other players type their real addresses during the BoB registration process. His plans were foiled by Kirito and Sinon, and eventually goes to prison after the incident had passed.

Sword Art Online (SAO)
Skills
 * One-Handed Estoc

Gun Gale Online (GGO)
Skills Equipment
 * Knife Creation
 * Weapon Creation
 * Starship Metal Estoc - Weapon created with game skills.
 * «Metamaterial Optical Camouflage»
 * Type 54 "Black Star" Pistol
 * Accuracy International L115A3

Gallery

 * See Shinkawa Shoichi/Image Gallery