Uminawa Derk was born to a wealthy family with their own patch of land in Water Country. The Uminawa bloodline owned several of the Archipelago islands, as well as a quarter of all the mansions in the outer and more serene rings of Kirigakure. The areas known for their lush grass and splendor untouched by the care of man that made these little mansion yards stand out like the pearl of Kirigakure's mossy asphalt and gloom.
Despite being a healthy boy, tall of stature, with long, black hair that extended a tip lower than his shoulders and sky-blue eyes, Derk never spoke a word to his aristocrat parents, or anyone else, for that matter. It was unclear where the boy's resolution to stay a mute by choice came from, but the more time passed, the fewer would test the fortitude of his unspoken vow to never speak a word.
Being a well-off and influential family in the entirety of the Water Country, thriving in the craft of sea trade that was vital as the blood pumping through the veins of the archipelago nation, many families in the Uminawa Zaibatsu would have hidden the boy away from the public eye, forced him to speak through psychological or physical pressure or simply made him disappear and shaken off the trouble. No one wanted a white crow flapping in their aviary, but Derk was lucky enough to be born to a loving and caring family that cared little about the boy's quirks and self-prescribed muteness.
Derk's father had hoped that while the boy would refuse to speak, he'd perhaps keep the intelligence of his bloodline and that the countless priceless connections that the Uminawa Zaibatsu had forged through the ages would accept him for the man he was not the man he refused to present himself as. Sadly, all attempts to educate the boy proved futile, as he proved himself to be painfully average in all things. While the business partners would've gladly spat aside and pressed the hand of a business-savvy mute, they'd have raised eyebrows when presented by a quiet and dull giant.
Not that the boy's family cared too much about what the other people would think of them because of their son. It was more that the Uminawa Zaibatsu was a conglomerate of families just as influential and savvy, just as connected and wealthy, but much more ruthless to boot. They would not have had a weak and rusty link dragging the Uminawa name down. The sea trade business was the bloody diamonds of the Water Country. Many would have killed and had killed for the opportunities and the connections that the Uminawa had to keep the blood of the archipelago pumping. Even the Feudal Lord and the Kage wouldn't have minded testing the waters of a cheaper merchant guild helming the ship of the trade, however, until the Uminawa showed weakness, this remained a sweet dream of the still seas.
It was only when Uminawa Derk grew to the age of 14 that his father had the splendid idea of sending his son off to train with a branch of the Kirigakure Demons. The Uminawa influence and their funds extended all the way to the ninja village and various establishments and organizations functioning within. While the Demons may not have felt too excited about an aristocrat playing pretend amongst their ranks without having even graduated Ninja Academy, Oni Mask himself would have ditched his prosthetics and tied his hair to pigtails for the opportunity to plump his organization constantly struggling for relevance against other wanna-be Black Ops groups with the Uminawa funding that the family owning their own sizeable island on the Archipelago could offer.
While the Demons commonly mocked Uminawa Derk for his lack of skill, Oni Mask noticed something in the boy that he loved very much. By all accounts, young Uminawa Derk was a slug and his punches were sacks of feather to trained shinobi, but Oni Mask noted how the boy held nothing back when striking. Even when he knew his opponent was tough as a bar of iron to punch or try to break, Derk always swung his best without regard for his own body. While Oni Mask wouldn't accept Uminawa Derk as his pupil or part of his organization nor would he recommend his father to have his boy pursue the path of a military career, the masked enigma did occasionally meet the boy for private lessons and wouldn't mind mentoring the boy a bit to help him direct his peerless "drive".
"I would love any of my trained assassins to have the killer instinct your boy has. If only instinct wasn't all he's good for…" Oni Mask would seldom commend the boy when meeting his father and discussing business. The Demons sometimes had to do what they had to and scare or eliminate competition of the Uminawa Zaibatsu. Even the kindhearted father of young Derk saw the need for the bloody sanitarians who loved double dipping in both the public and private sector occasionally. Only the Kumogakure Black Ops ever sold their business to the private sector, which was what led to the formation of the Imarizu, the Raikage's unconditional yes-men.
Because of the common business the two had together, Oni Mask often invited young Derk to come along and serve as a towel boy for murder and mayhem of sorts. A squire of assassins. It was there that young Derk learned this curious habit that would later define his adult life and drive him to choose the path of instilling fear into the hearts of Seafoam Island. Following the Demons' path and serving as the assassin "young boy" Uminawa Derk has discovered the fact that assassins would wear disguises and dress up differently to deceive the beholders of being someone else.
Even though, for obvious reasons, he would never say it to anyone, Uminawa Derk had become awe-struck by this simple concept and would forever etch it onto the canvas of his soul. It was because of that very lesson that when Uminawa Derk had killed his first victim, a firstborn son of the Uminawa Zaibatsu family on the Seafoam Island and the heir to the seat of the head of the Zaibatsu, that Uminawa Derk would skin the young man's face and wear it afterward.
Uminawa Derk had thusly disguised himself as someone and something that he felt like he wanted to be. That way, he applied the lessons learned while working with the Demons. While his killing of the heir to the seat of the head was precise and quiet, the confusion that followed when his family and staff discovered an unknown giant roaming the estate with the still fresh and bloody face of their inheritor caused Uminawa Derk to freak out and the following savagery was anything but subtle.
Even if the Uminawa Zaibatsu knew of their white crow spoiling its feathers in royal blood, they were quite content with keeping the matter quiet. It wasn't like the Zaibatsu lacked potential heirs and ambitious rears to occupy the big seats. What was of far greater value was the fiasco one of their own was butchering people and flaying their faces to prance around and acting like someone else being kept hush-hush. Since no one ever to see Uminawa Derk's face lived to tell the tale, choosing instead to become the mute's mask, the Uminawa Zaibatsu acted ignorant even if Oni Mask immediately named the hand holding the hilt of the skinning blade.
Thus began the killing spree of the Haunt. A figure dressed in bland bodysuits that handled blood without becoming soaked and wearing the pale faces of dead men and even dead women, giving the accomplished serial killer his trademark name. While the Haunt occasionally decided to live his life as someone from all layers of society all across the Land of Water, he loved being a rich aristocrat from Seafoam Island the most. On increasing occasions, the Haunt even butchered competitors to the Uminawa Zaibatsu's business ventures and various high society members of rival bloodlines. As Oni Mask often pondered when speaking of the black sheep boy to his father, if the Uminawa Zaibatsu would reject him, the Haunt would wear the skin of their rival family and seek to bury his old bloodline under… Only to become bored and skin himself a new face and live an entirely different life until he returned to his primary goal again.
This caused outrage amongst both the flea-ridden peasants of the Archipelago and the rival aristocratic families. Their outrage fell against deaf ears, however. It was almost as if it was useful to someone to have a sanitarian that trimmed the ranks of rival aristocrat families out of misguided and short-lived attempts to get back at his own bloodline that dismissed him as a black sheep. Almost as if the killer had a shadowy backing amongst the Kirigakure Black Ops, that may or may not have had something to do with young and ambitious teams of genin found dead and de-faced like the Haunt's own victims, except their faces would never be seen again and the Haunt would never wear them, nor would he have ever had the need for this many faces, to begin with.
It was only when an oblivious hick kunoichi from the remote Nadeshiko village encountered the Haunt and managed to beat him into submission that the Haunt was captured and his true identity was revealed to the Land of Water. Of course, the Uminawa Zaibatsu feigned ignorance and pointed fingers at the scapegoat family of butchered heirs and Kirigakure extravagantly negotiated the Haunt being returned to them and jailed at the Rarorenga Prison. The abyssal dread of the country and a fine answer to Konoha's own bag of cruelty and mistreatment known as Jigoku.
Many have campaigned and marched for the Haunt's public execution, but none were brave enough to swim out into the boundless seas and try to find Rarorenga in its dark abyss to see what they saw as justice be done. Some deluded themselves that the Haunt was indeed executed behind the scenes at Rarorenga while others bargained that Rarorenga was one of the world's deadliest prisons housing some of the most psychotic butchers and most dangerous inmates in the world who were too dangerous to be kept alive but too tough to kill. Surely the Haunt too would have long since met his end, confined in a place like that…
Fazif jumped at the serial killer, exploiting the opening of the lumbering lout just standing in place, slashing with his right hand and triggering the gearwork that spun the blades he had equipped all throughout the arm. The Haunt's bulky body stiffened his chest and leaned backward as a triple slash flared up and spouted blood where the Scarecrow of Swords had cut him. With feline grace and precision, Fazif slashed with his left, perfectly transferring the weight, but the serial killer tilted his arm and blocked part of the slash with the busted blade he clenched in his hand. Despite the block, a lone blade still slit across the Haunt's side while the chipped end of the blade lingered close to the masked face of the serial killer.
Smelling blood and feeling emboldened by his success, Fazif charged with an uppercut of his right hand. The Haunt staggered back as the flayed face he wore for a mask split into many pieces, exposing patches of a dirty face covered in dried-out blood underneath. Content with just showing off, the airborne mercenary vaulted back, defying the laws of physics by back flipping in mid-air as the crossed spare blades equipped to his back pronged up alongside those surrounding his arm and formed a buzzing bolt of sharp pain. With a grievous and deep cut on his left eye and a swollen gash on the right side of his face where the swords missed his other eye, the one-eyed murderer stumbled back.
"Hmm? Still standing, lug? You did yourself a misfortune by chipping my blade. It'd have slashed your other eye out, you'd have gone blind and made it easier for me to finish you. Now you'll just have to bleed and struggle like a stuck pig," Fazif took a low pose, feeling safe by the drastically reduced depth perception of his one-eyed opponent. The towering serial killer took one bold step forward and within a microsecond, silver crescent flashes surrounded him, each one opening a deep fresh cut.
A tight grip locked around the brass rings protecting Fazif's chest. The killer's thick fingers slid underneath and raised him into the air, just forcing through the punishment as if the pain didn't exist. The mute butcher tilted his opponent in the air and flung him with wild force. The audience bawled, as not even Fazif's impressive skill with swords nor his speed could have saved him from hurling out of bounds in mid-air. Or so they thought, as the Scarecrow of Swords etched a blade halfway into the ground and chipped it off to stop his momentum, before repurposing the kinetic energy to thrust him back at the killer in full swing.
Brushing through the network of slashes, with berserk raw power and toughness and remarkable speed of a madman smelling blood in the water, the Haunt charged at Fazif as well, ignoring all semblance of defense, the serial killer grabbed hold of his opponent while the latter was too busy madly slashing about and desperately chasing anything vital. Swinging Fazif over his head, the Haunt slammed the mercenary into the ground with a deafening shockwave.
Without as much as a twitch to his face, the serial killer thrust the chipped sword he had robbed off of the Scarecrow of Swords into the mercenary's gut, slipping in between the brass armor rings and forcing a torrent of red to gush out. With the audience gasping and clamoring, the static killer stood tall and got off of his opponent. The Haunt stopped in place, staring off somewhere in the distance as if the man he had just plunged a blade into the guts of didn't exist at all.
"Y-You!" Fazif wheezed out while spouting alarming quantities of blood from his mouth. The mercenary kicked up to his feet, soaking the ragged cloth he wore underneath his light brass armor in red. The injured swordsman took a fighting stance before realizing that his opponent was no longer where he had just last seen him. The audience gasped as the Haunt stood behind Fazif, back to back, with his chipped blade pointing out toward the spectator section and dripping red. Another spray of crimson erupted from Fazif's chest. The mercenary gargled up and staggered back, slamming into the serial killer's back.
Turning around, the Haunt tripped Fazif up with his right arm by sweeping the legs and then thrust the chipped blade down. Fazif crossed his own swords out in front of him and directed them in a scissor-like position, looking to chop the arm of the overly eager serial killer off. Instead, the Haunt's hand blurred and vanished from the elbow up. Fazif whited out as shallow slashes littered his body where the Haunt's blade found its way through the brass armor and spat out flocks of sparks where it didn't. With this painful distraction, the serial killer went up into the air at least twice his own height and stomped with a brutal, rib-shattering go.
Grabbing his limp and broken opponent by his neck, the serial killer lifted him up in the air and stared at the man's stunned, whited-out expression for a brief, uncomfortable pause. The same blade that the Haunt chipped off of Fazif's configuration of frames and gear gadgetry slipped under the brass rings and in between the busted ribs. The Haunt worked the broken tool like an experienced butcher, sliding it up and pushing it deeper to find the heart without letting the armor restrict him too badly. Fazif spat out one last mouthful of blood to soak the killer's face before going limp in a moment.
The rest of Fennec's hired guns didn't rush to avenge one of their favorites. While they noted Fazif's demise, none of the mercenaries and raiders had enough loyalty and kinship with one another to care too much about such a thing. The advantage of sitting low and keeping one's head down, avoiding unnecessary fighting in the early stages, was far more valuable than empty gestures of revenge to them. They all had a pretty clear idea that their fallen peer would've thought the same.
"And the terrifying Haunt has slaughtered Fazif, the Scarecrow of Swords, using his unorthodox fighting style! The feared mercenary just couldn't find anything to cut or sever in his opponent that'd keep him down, but I have to wonder if this daring fighting style won't end up costing the Haunt in the end. Those injuries look horrific and while he may be a psychotic colossus of butchery, the Haunt is still human! Either way, there are now 158 competitors left duking it out in the arena!" the announcer turned to point his hand at the ring that had fighting busting out underground, in the air, and on the wreckage of the arena at the same time. In the spiky mountainous chunks of erupted stone and the ridge in the middle too.
Madness had taken hold of the arena from the get-go and showed no signs of slowing down. A massive, shimmering in ethereal golden colors pneumatic hammer drill burrowed into a network of interconnected tunnels and craters made by the other colliding combatants. The moment that the device made it through, it dissolved in golden light, letting a superhero in a black and white bodysuit covering his entire body head to toe flop inside the underground tunnel where he planned to wait out the action that was getting too heated above.
"Oh, and who are you then?" a husky and chilling voice made the athletically built man stiffen up and gulp in sweaty terror as a faceless shape with two lines of banana-long teeth chattering against one another leaned in from over the superhero's shoulder. The ghastly underground dweller was clad in a dark cloak that became smokier, more lingering, and less tangible the further down it went. "No one to save here, little superhero…"
Somehow, to the self-made mountain rescue professional, it felt much worse knowing that he'd collide against this foul-smelling and even fouler-looking magician underground and out of the audience's sight. This guy definitely had the vibes of someone who'd just eat people for no reason and make them disappear until the announcer did the headcount and figured out people were missing.