Aincrad Liberation Force

Aincrad Liberation Force, more commonly known as «The Army», is «Sword Art Online»'s largest guild consisting of three thousand players. The Army's headquarters is located at the «Black Iron Castle» on the first floor of Aincrad.

Background
Before the tragedy of the 25th floor, the Aincrad Liberation Corps, led by Kibaou, was a part of the Clearing group (about 1/3 of the group at the time were from the ALC) and Kibaou himself motivated everyone on the frontlines to continue fighting and was even regarded as the leader of the clearing group. However, everything changed on the 25th floor. This was a floor that housed abnormally strong monsters, when compared to the 24th floor, its topography was as complex as a maze and top it off, there were plenty pitfall traps, which led to poisonous swamps, while information about the floor from NPCs was scarce. That's when Kibaou got hooked up on false information and rushed into the boss room with only 40 or so members of the guild, which couldn't even make an entire raid group. Over half of the ALC died as a result. After the event, Kibaou and the remaining members of the ALC parted from the clearing group and left for the first floor, where they merged with the mutual aid organization, «MMO Today», led by Thinker, and this congregation eventually turned into the Aincrad Liberation Force.

Initially, the main goal of the ALC was to clear the game, while the goal of MTD was to spread information and resoures equally among as many players as possible, but, after the merge of the two guilds, the congregation which later became ALF was formed and turned into an organization for maintaining order among players. They were nicknamed «The Army» after they began to wear armored uniforms.

History
It was actually a guild created after the merge of the mutual aid organization «MMO Today», formed by Thinker, and the former clearing guild «Aincrad Liberation Corps», led by Kibaou. After the merge, Thinker remained as the official guild leader of the new guild, while Kibaou became the sub-leader. However, the guild grew so large in number of players and lacked the strong leadership required to maintain such a large guild that coups and revolts became quite common and the leaders of the guild gradually lost control of the guild, while Kibaou came to power. Kibaou then began strengthining the structure of the organization and changed the name of the guild to Aincrad Liberation Force. Additionally, he began monopolizing fields with effective rates though multiple displays of power, greatly increasing the guild's profits and giving political power to his supporters, which eventually led to them getting carried away and starting acts of extortion under the name of "tax collection", while Thinker had been reduced to a mere figurehead.

However, due to focusing mainly on accumulation of wealth and power, many players were dissatisfied with Kibaou for not caring about clearing the death game, causing Kibaou to take action to restrain this dissatisfaction. However, after a disastrous reckless gamble of sending 12 of the highest level players of the guild to defeat the boss of the 74th floor on their own, which resulted in death of the commanding officer of the squad, as well as 2 other members, he was about to be exiled from the guild, therefore he set a trap for Thinker, luring him to a high leveled dungeon under the Castle, unarmed and with no teleportation crystals, and using a corridor crystal to send him deep into the dungeon, where he was trapped in the safe zone at the end of the dungeon, and successfully assumed control of the guild, until Thinker was rescued by Kirito, Asuna, and Yulier. Kibaou and his followers were exiled from the army after this event and Thinker decided to break down the guild to create a more peaceful organization for mutual aid once again.

Known Members
Members were originally a group gathered by Thinker, but later took in players who exhausted their starting funds and needed Col to pay for their food.
 * Thinker - Leader and Founder
 * Yulier - Thinker's second in command
 * Cobert - Lieutenant Colonel, Deceased
 * Kibaou - Former sub-leader and, later, the unofficial (temporary) leader, Exiled.