Name Ounuma Usui
Voice Actor Unknown
Nickname The Blind Swordsman, Juppon Gatana Mouken
Hair Color Black
Eye Color Has no eyes
Height Unknown
Age Unknown
Weapon Tinbei, Rouchin
Weapon Technique Ryuukyu, Shingan
Special Moves Unknown
Personality Not a very nice man at all. He kills for fun and keeps a tab on the numbers.
Backround History In the past Usui came up against Shishio and was defeated by him. In the fight Shishio took Usui's eyes and left him for dead. As Usui lay there he heard something strange. He got up and wandered in the darkness that his world had now become. Stumbling a lot he finally reached the sound that had called to him. It was a river, and thinking back it was really far away. Usui realized that his other senses had taken over for his now gone vision and that he still had a chance to fight. With that in mind he trained to the extreme and developed his Shin-gan. With the Shin-gan he could take a glimpse into the soul of his opponent and predict their every move. He joins the Juppon Gatana just so that he can be close to Shishio, so that he can finally extract his revenge and kill him - or so he says. When Kenshin, Saitou and Sano are on the final stretch of their journey to fight Shishio they are confronted by Shishio. Sano, already resting from his fight with Anji is not able to fight him and Saitou steps up to the challenge. With no time to spare Kenshin runs on ahead to take on Shishio. In the fight Usui actually inflicts some pretty heave damage on Saitou (not an easy task) and even dodges the left handed gatotsu attack (Saitou's pattented horizon attack) a few times using his turtle shell shield! As he thinks he is about to win his Shin-gan is explained and we learn that he's actually using his super sensitive hearing to listen to the heart beat and muscle movements of his opponents in order to predict their next moves. As Usui thinks he has Saitou beaten Saitou unleashes his Zero stance gatotsu attack in which he needs no room to build momentum. The attack causes Saitou's sword to go through Usui with such force that he's pinned to a wall above the door to the room they fought in.
Watsuki's View "The idea for this character came from conversations I had with my assistants. A lot of the Ten Swords start with my assistants saying "What about this?" and then I add this or that and finish them up, but with Usui, my then-assistant was really pushing for a blind swordsman. At first I wasn't very enthusiastic about it, but after we came up with the idea of listening to your opponent's heartbeat to judge his mental state, he became one of the Ten Swords. At first, I meant to draw Usui as a strong, Terminator-like character who would follow Kenshin relentlessly throughout the city after his fight with Chou. To my complete surprise, by the time I finished working out the story, he had fought with Saitou and met his death . . . He unexpectedly had a lot of fans, so in that respect he was helped more than Raijuuta. Since I didn't use it with Usui, I'm thinking of using the Terminator idea after the Kyoto story. Coming soon! "As for the design, a lot of people thought it was Lau from Virtua Fighter, but it was actally Tao Pai Pai from Toriyama-sensei's Dragon Ball. (The first bad guy to defeat Goku, the one that really leaves an impression.) About the eyeball design, at first I imagined him wearing some kind of traditional costume, but after I saw the angel that looked like a cloud covered with eyes in Evangelion, I quickly changed it. (Up until about the twentieth episode I was really caught up in Evangelion, so major or minor those characters had a big effect on me. Man, I can't keep any of my secrets.) To reveal even more, at first I was thinking of Usui as a handsome man with long hair. But when I tried it out, he looked like Ukyou from Samurai Spirits. "This won't work, I'll get hit again," I thought, got a fresh sheet of white paper, and drew the Usui you see now. There were a lot of different influences on his design, but I think he ended up being an original and not too bad, either. I guess being really good and completely original would be too much to ask for..."