Rage burned through Mark like something living, clawing its way up from his chest the longer he knelt beside his wife's body. Anna had been the reason he'd walked away from the organization in the first place — the reason he'd stopped being a weapon and started being a person again. She'd saved him from becoming nothing but a tool built for killing.
Now his anchor was gone. There was no Anna left in his life to come home to.
Whoever had done this was going to die. He'd make sure of it.
"You could at least thank me," a voice drawled from somewhere behind the rubble, eerie and dripping with mockery, "for giving this place a little makeover."
Mark went still. Darkness began gathering around his body in slow, deliberate coils, condensing into something close to armor with every passing second.
"I never thought you'd be the one to do this," he said quietly, not turning around yet. "Joseph."
Joseph stepped into view, walking without hurry through the ruins of the house that used to be Mark's entire world, as though the destruction around him was simply scenery.
"You shouldn't have left, Mark." His voice carried none of the mockery now — just something older, colder, and far more personal. "You shouldn't have left me there. We made a promise once. Together, forever, remember? And you took the shortcut out and left me behind to deal with everything that followed."
He let that hang in the air for a moment before continuing, each word landing with deliberate weight.
"Do you have any idea who they tortured, over and over, trying to pull information about you out of? Who do you think paid for your little escape, Mark? Tell me who."
His cloak shifted as he spoke, revealing enough of what sat underneath to count, technically, as a face — eyes, a nose, a mouth, arranged in ways that made it clear whatever Joseph had become, it wasn't entirely what he used to be.
Mark's whole body shook, rage and horror tangled together until he could barely tell which was driving him. "So you did all of this," he said, voice low, "because of me."
"Your father approved the mission," Joseph said flatly, as if that explained everything and settled nothing at the same time. "But we've talked enough. It's time for you to die."
The shadows coiling around Mark solidified in an instant, compressing into a long, jagged shape in his outstretched hand. "Penumbral Lance."
Darkness erupted from the weapon in a single, concentrated line, tearing through the ruined air toward Joseph with a speed that should have ended things immediately.
Joseph only smiled. "Crimson Shackles."
Chains burst into existence out of nothing, intercepting the lance mid-flight and shattering it apart in a spray of fading black light. Before the last fragments hit the ground, Mark had already closed the distance, driving a fist forward with everything he had left.
Joseph caught it. Effortlessly.
"Your cultivation," he said, almost gently, almost sadly, "is weak."
"Infernal Torment."
What followed didn't feel like an attack so much as a verdict being carried out. Thin needles of fire erupted from everywhere at once, piercing through Mark's body in dozens of places simultaneously, each one precise, each one calculated to maximize everything it touched. It was less like being struck and more like being used as a pincushion by something that had done this exact thing a hundred times before and felt nothing about doing it again.
Mark's knees buckled. The pain arrived in waves too large to process individually, blurring together into one long, unbroken scream his body no longer had the strength to voice out loud.
And through all of it, in the last clear second his mind managed to hold onto before the pain dragged him somewhere darker, he saw his son.
Klaus, on his knees in the wreckage, crying out, red eyes catching the sunlight in a way that made them glisten like something almost unnatural.
Regret hit him harder than any of Joseph's flames had managed. He should have grabbed Klaus the moment the earthquake started. He should have run the second he felt that first tremor, instead of staying to confirm what his gut had already told him about Anna. He should have done a hundred things differently, and now there was no time left to do any of them.
With whatever strength remained in a body that had already been torn through a dozen times over, Mark forced one final word out, raw and desperate, aimed entirely at his son.
"RUN!"
The word cracked in the middle, more plea than command, and then the fire took the rest of him — his vision collapsing into white, then nothing, the last thing he carried into the abyss not fear, not even pain, but the small, fading hope that his son had actually listened.
Behind him, Joseph lowered his hand slowly, watching the body crumple without any particular satisfaction on what passed for his face. Somewhere nearby, a small boy's scream rose up over the wreckage, raw and endless, and for the briefest moment, something flickered across Joseph's expression that almost looked like hesitation.
It didn't last.
He turned toward the sound instead, cloak dragging through the ash and broken stone, already calculating what came next.