Laughing Coffin

«Laughing Coffin» (ラフィン・コフィン) is an infamous Player Killing red guild in «Sword Art Online», due to the intensity of their Player Killing activity.

Background
The Laughing Coffin guild is a guild started by PoH and other orange players. Before the foundation they were simply orange players that surrounded solo players or small player groups to steal their items in exchange for their lives, however, there none of such encounters resulted in murder. At some point, PoH started spreading the belief that it was all right to kill others. As the orange players admired PoH for the opposite reason that the clearers admired Heathcliff, more orange members joined their ranks.

On New Year's Eve in 2023, the guild, who had already had 30 members, decided to make themselves publicly known and to do so, they attacked a small guild having a party in the field and killed all of the players, the first murders in Sword Art Online's history. The next day, January 1, 2024, information about the guild reached the main information providers in Aincrad.

The guild was known for torturing and killing their victims. One method of killing players involved inflicting paralysis on a player and then killing them slowly and painfully. Most if not all of the members are skilled in potion mixing, as Kuradeel stated that he learned how to poison (paralysis) water from another member in the guild.

A Murder Case in the Area


On April 19, 2024, the guild was hired by Grimlock to kill Schmitt, Yolko and Caynz to close the case of Griselda's death as he was worried that they would eventually find out that he had hired the guild earlier to kill Griselda. PoH, XaXa and Johnny Black were sent to kill the three, but were eventually foiled and driven away after Kirito told the three reinforcements were coming soon.

The Crusade
By August 2024, they had already killed hundreds of players, thus they were now the number one threat against the Clearers. The Clearers tried to negotiate with them via messengers, but the guild killed every one that they sent. After realizing that they would never stop killing and finding out the location of the guild's headquarters from a member of the guild, the clearers formed a high-level crusade party to wipe the guild out. Fifty high-leveled players (including Kirito and Asuna) went to attack them, however, just before they reached the designated location, the Laughing Coffin members were warned about the incoming party, so they decided to ambush the crusaders instead. Although some of the crusaders were unable to kill the red players, as the guild would not yield, some of the crusaders finally took the initiative of finishing off the Laughing Coffin members. At the end of the battle, twenty-one Laughing Coffin members and eleven crusaders had died, with most of the remaining Laughing Coffin members, including XaXa and Johnny Black, being arrested by the clearers and sent to the Black Iron Palace prison. PoH is the only known member who had avoided the crusade, thus he was neither killed nor arrested.

October, 2024
Although the guild was vanquished during the crusade, PoH, who avoided the crusade, watched Kirito and Kuradeel's duel on the 74th Floor. Sometime after the duel and before Kirito went on a training mission with Kuradeel and Godfree, Kuradeel was approached by PoH and invited to join the guild, as well as being taught how to make paralysis poison.

Trivia

 * Although called a guild, due to their severe criminal activity, the guild is not recognized by the system, thus all of its members are not recognized as being part of an actual guild and may even infiltrate other guilds.