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The manslayer

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Another Rurouni Kenshin fanart piece for Ayezur. This one is for AU story Invictus, where the bakumatsu never happened and chattel slavery is practised. The Kanryuu family is profiting from new advances in how to condition the slaves, and they back the Tokugawa rule. The fanfiction can be found in ff.net: [link]

This piece portrays the scene in chapter 1 (proloque) where Megumi is escaping from Kanryuu and turns.. and finds Kanryuu's most feared "guard" slave behind her.

"A stick snapped behind her. She whirled.

"No…"

She nearly sobbed.

The manslayer stood at her back, sword unsheathed and gleaming in the moonlight. She fell backwards, groping towards her tunnel, knowing that there was no way on earth she could outrun him. Her heart pounded rabbit-fast in her chest; her fingers went numb and thick with fear.

"Please." Her voice cracked. "Don't."

He advanced on her, blank-eyed, and raised his sword."

The Invictus as a story is a particular favourite of mine, and as such I have been wanting to draw fanart for it for a while. But I have been stuck on how to portray all the emotion Ayezur has laden in the story. So, in this piece I tried to portray the eerie feel Kenshin carries around himself.. his face is absolutely black, his eyes glow but don't show any expression. He is not a person, but has been reduced to a sum of his abilities, just a machine really.

I didn't want to add all that much details to this, mainly because I am still suffering from all that detail work I did for Shogun's demon. So, because of this everything is a bit blurry and background in particular is very general. I kept if that way also because the happenings there are not that important.

I did some considerable thinking how Kenshin's slave clothes under Kanryuu's rule would look like, but in the end I didn't differ too much from original setup. The main difference is that the kimono is lighter than Hakama.. and the standart "battousai" color themes are swiched. I tried a multiple different color themes, because I didn't want to use gray / navy blue combo... but Kenshin just looks good in those colors. Only better color combo was in fact the red / light gray. And I am saving that one (hopefully) for future pieces where Kenshin finally does his own choises regarding the clothing.

Kanryuu's family crest is a random Japanese family crest that I googled, however, I took out of that only the center piece and inverted the colors in it. I was going to design completely original crest for Kanryuu, but then laziness stroke.

Special thanks for Ayezur yet again for being an inspiration and writing absolutely wonderfull fanfiction.

If you are interested in seeing the in progress story of this picture, it can be found in my blogpost:
[link]
Image size
600x1174px 735.42 KB
© 2013 - 2024 Rahmakapala
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cavaloalado's avatar
Fantastic gallery! Congratulations for the great work!