Yuuki Konno

About Yuuki Konno

Yuuki Konno is the undefeated Absolute Sword, leader of the Sleeping Knights, a guild of players from a hospice for the terminally ill. She lives full-time in virtual reality on a medical Medicuboid, and her joy in playing created an eleven-hit sword skill no one else has matched. Her week of adventure with Asuna, racing to carve their names on the Monument of Swordsmen, is the most beloved story in Sword Art Online.

Appearance

Yuuki is a small, bright-eyed girl with long purple hair worn loose, red eyes and a grin that arrives before she does. As an Imp in ALfheim she has violet skin-toned features, pointed ears and small wings, dressed in dark purple light armour with a slender longsword. She moves like joy made physical, bouncing, spinning, challenging strangers to duels for the fun of it. Nothing about her suggests illness or fragility; that is precisely how she wants to be met, and the story honours it: Yuuki is presented first, and always, as the strongest sword in the game.

Personality

Yuuki is radiant: competitive, funny, fearless and completely uninterested in being pitied. She lives under a prognosis she never hides from herself, and her answer is to spend her time at full speed: duelling champions, leading her guild, making friends she will not be able to keep. Her philosophy, shared with Asuna, is that some things can only be said with a sword. She is the rare character whose strength is not a metaphor for her joy but the same thing as it: the Absolute Sword fights like someone who loves being alive, because she does.

Background & Story

Yuuki Konno lives full-time in virtual reality. A patient in a medical facility, she uses a Medicuboid, a medical full-dive machine, around the clock, and she leads the Sleeping Knights, a small guild of players in the same situation: terminally ill, playing together while they can. In ALfheim she is undefeated, the Absolute Sword, holder of an eleven-hit Original Sword Skill no one has matched. Her final project is simple and enormous: the Sleeping Knights will beat a floor boss alone, together, and carve their names on the Monument of Swordsmen in Aincrad's Black Iron Palace, proof that they were here. She recruits Asuna to help them do it.

Powers & Abilities

• Mother's Rosario: Yuuki's self-created eleven-hit Original Sword Skill, the most powerful sword technique in ALfheim, which she later entrusts to Asuna as its inheritor.
• The Absolute Sword: Undefeated in duels across ALfheim, Yuuki's reaction speed and sword skill surpass even Kirito's in a straight contest of blades.

Key Relationships

• Asuna Yuuki: The friend she chose to lead the Sleeping Knights' final raid, and the inheritor of Mother's Rosario, carrying Yuuki's name forward.
• Kirito: One of the only players to push her in a duel, Yuuki respects him enormously, and notes he was not fighting on his home ground.
• Siune: The Sleeping Knights' vice-leader and Yuuki's right hand. Siune helps Yuuki hold their little guild together to the very end of their adventure.

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