w (girls' frontline)

Scrapped design for what is commonly speculated to have potentially been the sixth member of the AR Team.

Conceptually, not much is known about her, as she made limited appearances prior to a similar design being implemented in Arknights, in the form of W. Aside from post #3731497 (shared February 2016 during Girls' Frontline's third beta), Hai Mao had drawn her with M4 SOPMOD II on a signboard for a fan of the latter, around 2016 whilst they were selling a new doujin book (to the curiosity of the fan who'd later share the art on Weibo). With the design resemblance, and already designating her with the name W, players have thus decided to refer to this version of her as such too.

Design-wise, just as with Arknights' W, she appears to have white/silver hair along with dark red accents, though more akin to SOPMOD and less like antennae. Though both having bandanas or scarfs, in place of red horns, she wears a headset. Uniquely to her, she appears to have a mole under her left eye, and appears to have a walkie-talkie on her left shoulder. On the signboard, she also has hands like those SOPMOD has.

Though the association with SOPMOD has brought some speculation as to what her weapon may have been, it is most commonly thought to be the one that Arknights' W is seen with, a Mk18 Mod0 (derived from the SOPMOD accessory system for the M4 Carbine); otherwise known as the CQBR or CQBW (CQB Weapon), with some proponents of this theory speculating the "W" in her name to derive from the latter, bolstered by the fact that Arknights' W has "CQBW" as her in-game codename. In 2024, Girls' Frontline finally added a character representing the Mk18 Mod0.

Following Hai Mao's departure from MICA Team in 2017, and the formation of HyperGryph, it is probable that Hai Mao recycled the design for Arknights, alongside other elements they contributed that didn't make the cut for Girls' Frontline (such as the proto-Doctor design found with proto-W, or their proposed draft for the early chapters prior to Jano [热运动] rewriting it, involving an amnesiac Commander awaking in the middle of combat against an abstractly and fantastically strong Sangvis Ferri).