Fuurinkazan

Fuurinkazan (風林火山) is one of the clearing guilds in «Sword Art Online», with Klein being their guild leader.

Background


The Fuurinkazan is a guild started by Klein and a group of his friends from the real world. They had waited in line for a long time in order for each of them to obtain one of the 10,000 copies of the game. All of the members of Fuurinkazen have known each other since before SAO started. Klein had protected and guided all of them, until all of them had become well-capable players on the front-lines.

Aincrad Arc
Klein first mentions he was leader of the guild in a previous game to Kirito. Although Kirito wanted Klein to come with him to the next village to level up faster, Klein refused to because of his friends who were stuck in the Starting City's plaza. After parting, Klein headed back to the plaza and found his friends, and, after a prerequisite quest was completed on the 3rd Floor, they formed the guild.

Red-nosed Reindeer
Kirito ran into the Fuurinkazan on the 28th Floor and saw the guild training against Brad Wolf Leaders in the «Wolf Plains». Several months later, Kirito tried to find the location of «Nicholas The Renegade» and the guild followed him so they could find out where the boss was hiding and to also fight it. The guild was however followed by the Divine Dragon Alliance, thus Klein and his guild helped distract them while Kirito tried to find the boss' hiding spot.

October, 2024


The Fuurinkazan bumped into Asuna and Kirito in the Labyrinth of the 74th Floor. They also found that members from The Army were attempting to handle the boss without a raid party. When Asuna and Kirito rushed to the boss room, the guild was interrupted by respawning monsters. While Klein and Asuna held The Gleam Eyes off to allow Kirito to equip his Dual Blades skill, the other members took the remaining Army players out of harm's way, saving the remaining members that were still alive.

Fairy Dance Arc
Fuurinkazan was reformed in ALfheim. The members of the guild attended the SAO party to thank Kirito for freeing them from the cursed death game. With the exception of Klein, none of them have been seen playing ALfheim Online.

Trivia

 * The name of the guild is likely a reference to the battle standard used by Takeda Shingen's, quoting Sun Tzu's "The Art of War". "Move as swift as wind, [be] as orderly as [the] forest, [be] as fierce as [the] fire, [and be] as unshakeable as [the] mountain."
 * Although Fuurinkazan should mean Wind, Forest, Fire, Mountain, the official abbreviation of the guild is WWFM, meaning that instead of "Forest", "Woods" was used.
 * As each guild is able to register official abbreviations of their guild, the guild is officially registered in the system as WWFM, but nobody actually uses that abbreviation.
 * While the Anime portrays only 6 members in Fuurinkazan, including Klein, the Light Novel has mentioned that there are up to 10 members in the Guild.  The Light Novel also has instances where only 6 members are present. This may be due to the fact that SAO allows only up to 6 players to be in the same party, so the remaining 4 would be off somewhere else, possibly training, during the scenes where the guild makes an appearance.