Jean couldn’t tell what was real of the events that transpired in the previous twenty-four hours. He couldn’t tell which experience was part of the hallucinations caused by the infection which has now completely overwhelmed his body, or which one was part of the Phantom’s cruel mind games that seemed to have only one purpose. To cause him as much mental agony as possible.

There was only one thing that he was perfectly certain was real. He was completely powerless to move even an inch of his body. He was currently lying on his back, looking up towards a ball of light which was the only source of light in the darkness surrounding him. Has it really been twenty-four hours? He wasn’t sure. It could have been much longer and he could have simply not sensed it.

The mind numbing emptiness was suddenly interrupted by hoofsteps around him. He couldn’t tell if those were real or not either. He had once again seen the ghosts of his family circling around him in the past few hours. Sometimes they were mocking him over his failure, sometimes they were trying to console him and reasure him, he would soon be with them in the afterlife.

This time however, it was different. It was not the disappointed grumbling of his father that he had, not the voice of motherly warmth inviting him to finally give up the struggle and join them and not his little sister who kept altering between crying that she missed him and wanted him to finally reunite with them and singing mocking rhymes, taunting him about his defeat. No. This voice was completely new to him.

“What a pathetic sight.” The owner of the voice taunted. Jean had only enough strength to move his eyes and saw the outlines of the Phantom standing at the edge of the light and circle around him. “The last member of the once proud lunar race, defeated and broken, lying at the hooves of a freak like me. Your proud lunar ancestors are rolling in their graves.” Jean somehow found the energy to reply.

“I would not know. I have never known any of them.” He told him weakly. The Phantom merely chuckled in response.

“I suppose not. But you should be grateful to me. Before you die, I will allow you a glimpse into your race’s past. For your whole life, you have been searching for answers. Answers you couldn't possibly find. Now I will reveal them to you.” Jean found the Phantom’s choice of words rather curious.

“I do not suppose you have infected me with a deadly disease, had me run across all Equestria, forcing me to intervene in life threatening disasters to make the infection worse and then take me hostage when my body could take it no longer just so you could reveal to me the true fate of our race.” At the mention of the word our, the Phantom’s behavior changed completely. His mocking glee turned to furious anger as he marched over to Jean, stood over him and glared into his eyes.

“YOUR race, not ours!” He snarled. His burst of anger was short lived though, as his angry scowl was quickly replaced by the sadistic smile that Jean could have sworn was his default expression. "But worry not. Soon, you will see things my way." While Jean's physical strength may have left him, his mental strength was still present. He tried scanning the Phantom’s thoughts but to no avail. His adversary must have realised what he was trying to do and let out a cruel, taunting laugh.

"Don't bother! You can't get inside my head! Us, Green Lunars are born with a natural psychic resilience." Jean raised an eyebrow. While this newfound revelation was intriguing, the term the Phantom just used to describe himself caught his attention more.

"Green Lunars? I was unaware the Lunars came in more than one variety."

"Of course, you were!" The Green Lunar scoffed. "I belive the things you were unaware of regarding the Lunars would be able to fill several books. It's not like you ever had the chance to learn them." Jean managed to regain enough strength to shoot a glare of his own at him.

"Thanks to you and your Lunar virus, I suppose." The Phantom’s grin widened.

"Well, aren't you a real detective!" He mocked with fake enthusiasm. "Oh, wait! Even this piece of information had to be pointed out to you by your pony friend. I seem to have given you way too much credit." Jean grew tired of all his taunting.

"Well, since my detective skills are clearly not up to par, why don't you reveal your name? I believe it is time I had an identity to pair with your ghastly image." He spat. The Phantom however was unfazed by the insult.

"I have grown numb to the remarks about my appearance, J'inn." He laughed. "I have heard far worse from your peers back in my day. My name is Ma'alefa'ak. The saviour of the Green Lunars and the exterminator of the white ones."

"Exterminator, you say?" Jean scoffed. "The last time I checked, I am still alive."

"Only because I will it!" Ma'alefa'ak snapped, slapping Jean across the muzzle. "But that shall soon change! The only reason I am still allowing you to breathe is because I happen to be a sadistic bastard who will greatly enjoy breaking down everything you believed about your soon to be extinct species!" Jean's body was so numb at this point that he barely even felt the strike.

"You already bastardised the image of my family in my head." He replied, recalling his nightmare from a few nights ago. "What worse could you do possibly do to me?"

"You would be surprised." Ma'alefa'ak replied cruelly. "I have manipulated those images inside your head, that I confess. It has been quite tricky to to keep your little alicorn friend out of your head. She is a very powerful psychic indeed. But I have spent an untold amount of time on this wasteland so I had time to perfect my abilities. And I can assure you, what I'm about to show you is entirely the truth!"

Ma'alefa'ak stomped his hooves into the ground on both sides of Jean's head and looked intently into his eyes. Jean almost thought his eyes glowed up when he began to work his mental powers on him. Ma'alefa'ak was surprised how easily he was able to get inside Jean's head. He expected at least some futile effort at resistance, but then he remembered that he was so completely exhausted that even his mental resistance must have faded away by now.

When the Green Lunar managed to enter Jean's psyche, Jean found himself and Ma'alefa'ak floating in a great void, face to face with each other. Jean looked around but he couldn't see anything except for the evil Lunar in front of him. Seeing his confusion, Ma'alefa'ak broke the silence.

"We are inside your mind. I am mature enough to restrain myself from joking about how it must be the natural state of it being so empty. Your mind is an empty canvas for me to paint on, J'inn. Now watch an artist at work."

Ma'alefa'ak closed his eyes floated up over Jean, reaching out with his front legs. The darkness around the two Lunars immediately began to change. Light rays burst out of the dark and began to spread across the void, before twisting and turning until they started to take shape.

Jean eventually realised the outlines of buildings. He remembered the shape of these houses from his nightmare about his family. He looked around and saw several of the exact same dome shaped buildings around himself, forming a small town. In the middle of it, there was another building looking exactly like the others, dwarfing them with its size.

The town looked completely umremarkable. Even back in Equestria, there were hundreds like it. And yet for Jean, even seeing his fellow Lunars whom he's never known before living their everyday life in peace and harmony like this was marvelous.

Young ones were playing together, chasing each other or kicking balls. The older ones were walking around with their romantic partners or helping their fathers with some repairs around their houses. The females were going around doing their chores or gossiping with each other. All in all, it looked like the ideal small town picture that one would expect to see anywhere.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Jean jumped in surprise and looked to see Ma'alefa'ak standing next to him, looking at the scene with an equally serene expression that any creature would experience upon such a sight. But underneath the calm exterior, Jean could see the hatred that he knew the Green Lunar felt for his white counterparts.

"Not so much anymore now that you're here to sully the scene with your foul presence." Jean snarled. Ma'alefa'ak just scoffed as his smile widened.

"Sitcks and stones, J'inn. I already told you, I've heard every insult in the book before and there's nothing you can say regarding my appearance that would hurt me at this point."

"I was NOT talking about your appearance." Jean cut back. "Why are you showing this to me? Are you actually taking this much delight in tormenting me with a sight I have never got to treasure?"

"Well, that's part of it." Ma'alefa'ak agreed with a shrug. "But what I wanted to show you isn't here." He then turned around and pointed at something behind Jean. "It's there." Jean followed the direction of his hoof pointing at the large dome building in the middle of the town. "Come. Let's take a walk."

After only a few glances at the interior of the building, Jean could tell that this was the center of the community. Perhaps the town hall. But as the two Lunars headed deeper inside the building, he saw that its functions were much wider. He saw classrooms filled with students, laboratories researching all kinds of machinery and chemical solutions and medical facilities treating patients with different kinds of ailments and injuries.

"These community centers were the hearts and souls of their towns." Ma'alefa'ak explained. "In larger cities, there were several of them, each one operating in its own district." He then stopped in front of a window and looked inside the room with a fond look. The sincerest form of expression that Jean has seen on his face.

"How ironic. That the place that is supposed to be the heart of a community ended up producing the infection that would end this civilisation." He mused, much to Jean's disgust.

"Is this where you developed your virus? Is that what you wanted to show me?" The Green Lunar narrowed his eyes at him.

"I wasn't talking about the virus." He growled, making Jean recoil in surprise. "I was talking about me." Confused, Jean looked through the window and saw that the medical procedure being carried out inside was none other than a foal delivery.

The mother was lying on a bed, writhing in agony as she struggled to give birth to her offspring. Her husband held and pet her hoof gently while a nurse held her other one and the doctor performed the delivery. Jean couldn't tell what was supposed to be so peculiar about this birth, but when he saw that the newborn foal has green skin instead of white, he finally understood that this was the birth of Ma'alefa'ak.

He didn't understand why this moment was significant. Surely his birth must have been like any other ones in their race's history. But when he saw the horrified, shocked and outright disgusted looks on the parents' and the medical staff, he began to realise that there was something wrong.

"You still haven't put it together?" Ma'alefa'ak asked, irritated at Jean's cluelessness about what he wanted to show him.

"What are you talking about?" Jean snapped back. "I have put together that this is your birth. Are you so egotistical that you wanted to show me your life story?"

"No, you fool." The Green Lunar growled. "This sight should show you that your precious Lunar race was not as perfect as you like to believe! Don't you notice anything strange?" Jean looked back at the door and frightened Lunars. The doctor took the green newborn and left with him without any complaints from the parents. In fact, they even seemed rather pleased about getting rid of it. The sight upset Jean more than he wanted to admit.

"I have." He replied, feeling a mix of sympathy for the poor thing and severe disappointment at the parents. "They are all acting like there is something wrong with the foal. Were you born ill?"

"I might as well have." Ma'alefa'ak replied bitterly. Jean felt more anger and hatred radiating from him than ever before. "As far as they're concerned, us Green Lunars were a disease on their society. Like I said, we are born with great telekinetic resilience. Lunars were highly superstitious and anything different to them was a scourge. We also didn't share their weakness to fire which only further fueled their suspicions and hatred of us. If they couldn't see inside our heads and if we didn't share their weakness, that meant they couldn't control us. They were afraid of us so they needed to remove us from their world."

Jean was about to say something, but Ma'alefa'ak didn't wait for him to speak. He waved his hoof and the scene around them began to change. The hospital room disappeared and Jean found himself not in a tidy little town like the first time, but an extremely dingy looking ghetto that wouldn't have even passed for a settlement.

"This is the place where they banished my kind to." Ma'alefa'ak continued. "Not quite the accommodating place, is it?" Jean looked around and immediately wanted to accuse the Green Lunar of lying. Even if his ancestors' superstitious beliefs lead them to alienate their green counterparts, he refused to believe that they would condemn them to such a cruel fate as living here. Especially one who was a mere infant as Ma'alefa'ak was at the time.

But the facts hit him in the face when he saw a pair of White Lunars dressed in uniforms that resembled those of soldiers floated in as the green outcasts gathered around them and dropped off the newborn without any care in the world before leaving. The cries of the infant drew some of the Green Lunars closer until one of them stepped forward and scooped up the small bundle in her hooves, trying to soothe it.

"They had nothing except each other and the rags on their backs." Ma'alefa'ak spoke. Jean turned to him and saw that for the first time since he met him, his expression actually turned soft and warm. He obviously remembered his own kind fondly. "But they stuck together even in the worst times. They knew that this was their only chance of survival. Unity was our strength. And that eventually caught the eyes of the "superior lunar kind". He spat, putting sarcastic anger on the last three words.

Jean watched as Ma'alefa'ak sped the events around them up. Years have passed by in mere seconds and the next time the flow of events returned to their normal speed, the Lunar Jean recognised as Ma'alefa'ak was now a seven year old colt living in the ghetto the Green Lunars have been forced to.

He was currently standing next to an older Green Lunar whom Jean assumed was his caretaker as the adult was checking on an apparently sick Lunar mare lying on a makeshift bed. The weak mare coughed painfully as the stallion held her hoof, as if to reassure her in her final moments. Jean could hardly bear to look so he shifted his gaze to the young Ma'alefa'ak watching the scene.

It quickly became obvious to Jean that the Lunar he was dealing with was an emotionless sociopath from his birth as he couldn't see the slightest hint of disturbance or even sympathy for the poor, dying mare in front of him. If anything, he watched the scene with fascination as the mare breathed her last.

"May Luna grant you safe passage to the afterlife." The stallion said before pulling a sheet over the dead mare's body.

"Another one?" The young Ma'alefa'ak asked, making his caretaker jump in surprise.

"Why are you up so late? You should have been asleep hours ago!" He chastised the young one.

"Could you sleep with everything going on around here lately?" Ma'alefa'ak replied bluntly. The caretaker had no answer to that.

"That's exactly why you shouldn't be here watching this." He took the little Lunar by the hoof and escorted him back to his room.

"You didn't answer my question." Ma'alefa'ak said as he walked behind his caretaker. "Was she another one killed by the plague?"

"She died of the plague, yes." He replied sharply. "Which is another reason why you shouldn't be in this room! The last thing I want is for you to get infected as well."

"What's the point?" Ma'alefa'ak shrugged. "We're all going to get it anyway."

"No, we won't!" The older stallion replied firmly. "The community leaders left to negotiate with the city. We may have out differences but they wouldn't abandon us to just die like that." The colt rolled his eyes.

"Open up your eyes, you old fool! They already have!" He argued. "That's how we all arrived to this crater! They dump us here like thrash! They couldn't care less if the plague wiped us all out! They would probably celebrate it even!"

"Ma'alefa'ak, that is enough!" The caretaker yelled, slamming a hoof onto the ground. "You're too young to understand how the world works! You're emotions speak out of you!"

"No! I'm the one who's speaking the truth! You're the one who's too blinded by your emotions!" The caretaker said nothing in response, merely ordered the younger Lunar to his sleeping quarters before leaving to deal with some other infected.

"But sleep was the furthest thing on my mind in that moment." The real time Ma'alefa'ak explained to Jean. "As you will soon discover."

In the following moments, Jean witnessed as the young Green Lunar indulged himself in various studies of biology, chemistry and virology. It was clear that he became fascinated by the effects of viruses and diseases and he wanted to study its effects.

Jean watched in horror as Ma'alefa'ak snuck into the morgue of their community to study the effects of the infection that plagued their kind on their organs. With his x-ray vision, it was easy to look inside the corpses. He could even see the biological build of the virus in the cells of the deceased and used the knowledge to recreate it in his chemistry lab.

"Impressive, isn't it?" The Green Lunar mused to the white one. "So young and able to recreate the biological structure of a virus wiping out an entire species." Jean's response was merely a hateful scowl.

"If you could do that at such a young age, why didn't you create a cure for your kind?" Ma'alefa'ak's smug look turned into a furious glare of his own.

"Do you really think that didn't cross my mind?!" He roared in Jean's face. "There was no time to develop a cure and mass produce it in time to save enough Green Lunars to sustain a viable population! I only had time to create a serum for myself to make me immune to it."

Though he didn't show it, this caught Jean's attention. It turns out Spike was right. There indeed was an antidote and all he needed to do is make Ma'alefa'ak cough up how to make it. If he ever managed to regain his strength, that is. But for now, he needed to keep this psychopath talking.

"My kind was at the edge of extinction. But I decided if we would go out, I would take those bastards with us." He then turned back to Jean and gave him perhaps the widest and most evil grin imaginable. "Our trip down memory lane is coming to an end, J'Inn J'inzz. As the grand finale, I will show you something beautiful."

The scenery around the two Lunars once again shifted. Jean once again saw himself standing in the beautiful suburbs of the Lunar town he saw when they first began this mental journey, but this time, the peace and happiness was all gone. Instead, it resembled the end of the world.

It was just like the scene he saw in his nightmare that this monster installed in his head a few days ago. The constantly starry sky was covered in crimson red fog and in the center of it, Jean could see Ma'alefa'ak floating over the city with his front legs crossed across his chest as he gleefully observed the scene beneath him.

"Look at it, J'Inn J'inzz!" The genocidal alien gloated. "Look upon my works and despair!"

Jean didn't want to, but since his actions were now dictated by Ma'alefa'ak, it was impossible. The streets were littered with corpses and the bodies of the dying. Lunars of all ages, even newborn foals in the embrace of their mothers. Entire playgrounds filled with young Lunars. Crowded hospital rooms where the doctors tried in vain to treat the infected. To say that Ma’alefa’ak brought the apocalypse to the White Lunars would be perfectly accurate.

Jean couldn't take it anymore. He fell on his knees and he finally gave way to his distress that he's been concealing for so long. All the loneliness, sorrow and helplessness he ever felt over his race's extinction was brought to the surface by the horrors he was witnessing. And a new feeling was added to these as well. Fury. Not only did he lose his kind and had to spend an untold amount of time by himself because of it, but now he also knew the reason behind it. And it made him more furious than he ever felt before.

Ma'alefa'ak noticed this and grinned down at the suffering Lunar as he glared up at him. “What's wrong, J’inn?” He taunted. “Is witnessing the true nature of your ancestors too much for you or did the truth about their demise break you so badly?” Jean couldn't help it anymore. He let out a furious roar and charged at Ma'alefa'ak, completely forgetting that he was nothing more than a mental image. His emotional outburst made him blind to that fact and he just needed to unleash his anger.

The result was predictable. Jean merely phased through the body of the Green Lunar and crashed into the ground behind. Ma'alefa'ak just laughed tauntingly. “This is even greater than I could have imagined! I showed you so little and yet you're mind is already broken!” Jean just growled as he got back on his hooves.

“You are a monster, Ma'alefa'ak. You need to be stopped.” The Green Lunar just laughed.

“You won't be the one to do it, I'm afraid. Your body is almost completely overwhelmed by my virus. But don't worry. You won't die just yet.” Jean saw his surroundings begin to fade away. The lights that formed the mental environment around him were all extinguished and there was once again nothing but pitch black darkness around him.

“I want to relish in your suffering for just a little longer. So before my virus kills you, I will revive your body just so I can break it as I did with your mind. “Ma'alefa'ak spoke as his image began to fade away too. “See you again soon.”

And with that, Jean once again saw nothing but darkness…

Author's Note

Welcome back, everypony! I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Once again, a huge thanks for Lex the Pikachu for proofreading!

The Phantom finally revealed himself and he has plans for Jean. He has also discovered the true fate of Jean's Lunar species and retribution is definitely his highest priority right now. After survival, of course.

Make sure to tune in next time to find out how Jean will escape this predicament in...

Issue #8: The Chamber of the Ancients