Harry found himself hearing voices. Or, more accurately, a voice. The one from his dream, to be perfectly exact. It spoke of blood, and hate, and anger, and kept moving. Sometimes he would hear it in Snape's classroom (While Snape glared. At the ninja guards), other times in the bathroom, and sometimes just randomly in the halls. This might've bothered him less if his friends were also able to hear the terrible voice. After a week of listening to the thing natter on about 'nasty mudbloods', 'stupid foreigners', and some truly vile epitaths he refused to repeat, Harry would've given just about anything for someone else to hear it and prove he wasn't just crazy. The only thing convincing him he wasn't nuts was the spiders. Any time he heard the voice, there would be this enormous horde of spiders fleeing the area, which had naturally creeped Ron out, while Hermione had watched it and gushed, spouting things like 'amazing', 'unprecedented', 'a fascinating opportunity', and so on. Even so, it wasn't much of a clue. Maybe if he knew more about spiders...
There was something else, actually. There was one guard with a very odd design to his robes, all bulgy and misshapen for no reason Harry could discern, and anytime Harry heard the voice while this particular guard was in the vicinity, the ninja would twitch, or reach for something at his waist, or something of the sort. Whatever the case, he always seemed uneasy in the presence of the voice, though the one time Harry had tried to ask the ninja if they heard the voice too, the whole encounter had been extremely awkward and ended poorly. While Harry didn't recognize several of the words the man (For with a voice like that, there was no way they were a woman) used, given the way they were hurled, Harry was willing to hazard a guess that they weren't very nice at all. The man seemed quite convinced Harry was nuts, which wasn't exactly helping his self-confidence any.
Professor Lockhart's classes turned weird. He seemed to be trying to one-up himself or something, bringing in a bigger, more dangerous creature with every class, explaining how to defeat them, and then demonstrating how to do it. He was so terrible at it that by the end of the second week even Hermione was beginning to doubt his supposed greatness. The whole thing only stopped when Lockhart brought in something so large it couldn't be brought into the castle, forcing the class to be handled outside, and even then, it was entirely because the thing managed to break every bone in his right arm, as well as damaging his shoulder. Harry never did find out the name of that particular critter, and the Professor spent the next week with Poppy, getting everything fixed. Defense Against the Dark Arts was simply not taught during that time. It was easy to guess that Snape's particularly foul mood was from not being nominated as a substitute, though that didn't make it any easier to deal with his shorter-than-usual fuse.
When Lockhart did finally return to class, he seemed basically dead on his feet, and spent much of his time glancing nervously at the ninja guards in the room, sweating so badly Harry was surprised he didn't collapse of dehydration. The class itself became nothing more than a series of assignments to read the books detailing Lockhart's various adventures, which were mostly him singing his own praises, as opposed to providing practical, useful information for how to deal with the various beasts described. That was completely useless, and even Hermione's interest in the classes began to wane, as she turned her attention once more to the 'heir of Slytherin' mystery and the third-years books that were just so fascinating to her.
Harry eventually approached his Head of House, wanting to know what was going on with Lockhart. She had flatly refused to say anything about her fellow teacher, instead sending him back to his dorm firmly. So Harry tried talking to Hagrid again, which took forever to make happen, but when it did, the results were much better. Hagrid was somewhat vague, obviously trying not to be mean to anyone involved, but if Harry even remotely understood the conversation, the guard's leader had been unsatisfied with Lockhart's credentials. This had lead to some sort of confrontation, the leader had insinuated some horrible things about the Professor, and Lockhart had been completely outraged, then horrified, sputtering the whole way. He had, however, been able to produce an answer that satisfied Dumbledore enough that nothing had been done yet. Though Hagrid secretly believed that this was more because getting a more competent replacement would've been basically impossible right then... but don't tell anyone he said that!
Shortly after that, Harry found himself in the unusual position of seeing somone running away from the school. More specifically, Harry had woken up that morning, saw that the sun was barely up, heard some noise from outside, looked out a window, and spotted a person running away quite quickly. It wasn't until Dumbledore announced at the Great Hall that Defense Against the Dark Arts classes were temporarily suspended that a suspicion arose in Harry's mind, one which he shared with Ron and Hermione as soon as they had a moment of privacy. The three agreed to check if this idea held any merit, but were immediately distracted when Dumbledore proceeded to announce that the first-years were finally ready to join the rest of the school, at which point a crowd of kids came flooding in. This was attention-worthy in its own right, but it only got weirder when another table was made on the spot by Dumbledore, and all the first-years sat at this table. Not at the House tables. Not one student.
Then there was a roar of sound, but it came not from those confused and baffled by this turn of events, but instead from farther away in the castle. Harry noticed, ever so briefly, a grey-haired... man? Boy? Person, appear before the nameless ninja leader, before the two of them nodded and vanished noiselessly. Immediately afterwards, one of the cloaked ninja appeared atop the Gryffindor table and told the students to return to their dorms, as a group of ninja appeared around the table, those odd knives gripped in a hand each. Harry periphereally noted that this proccess was also occuring at the other House tables, and became worried. Another boom of sound, and the Great Hall literally rocked, causing panic to spread amonst the students, though oddly not amongst the first-years, whom were swiftly yet without hurry exiting the room, escorted by their own group of ninja, at which point Harry went beyond worry all the way into deep concern. Nonetheless, he hurried to exit the room with all his fellow Gryffindors, having personally experienced twitchy ninja and not desiring a repeat.
Unlike the other, perhaps saner students, Harry took the very first chance he spotted to escape the guards and rush, not away, but towards the previous bursts of sound, which he was increasingly believing were some kind of explosion. When a third one erupted, Harry noted the different direction it came from, adjusted course accordingly, and wondered to himself what could possibly be doing this. He was no expert on Hogwarts security, but Hermione had spoken on previous occasions, at great length, about the nigh-impenetrable defenses, and the ninja protection was presumably adding to that. What could have snuck in?... or was this some kind of prank? That seemed unlikely, but the Weasley twins had seemed to take the extra security as a challenge to their pranking ability... even so, explosions? On this scale? Harry had been running for several minutes (Fourth explosion, louder, and a bit to the left), and he still hadn't reached whatever was going on, and yet he had heard it all the way in the Great Hall.
As Harry felt he was coming closer, he slowed to a jog, his little lungs huffing and puffing, deciding it was best to be in good condition for... whatever this was. This was perhaps influenced by the return of the voice, which was hurling expletives and shrieking in fury, though it seemed distant. It also seemed to be coming from the same direction as the explosions, though what that might mean, Harry was uncertain. When he finally felt comfortable close (Which is to say that a fifth explosion rocked the ground with enough force to knock him off his feet. Hopefully he didn't have a concussion...), he slowed all the way to a walk, taking care to move quietly and peek around corners instead of charging blindly onward. This sounded dangerous, and the voice, which had grown piercing enough that Harry's ears had begun to hurt, was not making him feel any safer with its vulgar language, repeated threats on the lives of some unknown group of people ("I'LL KILL YOU ALL!!"), and... something else about it he couldn't place.
Finally Harry's careful corner-peeking yielded results, when he found himself seeing the rather extraordinary sight of an absolutely enormous snake battling (Yes, battling, as in fighting, as in back-and-forth-combat that is not a slaughterfest) a number of oddly dressed people. Harry hesitated to call them human, given not only several of the superhuman feats they were performing (Harry was fairly certain spontaneously jumping many times one's own height without apparent effort was not in the realm of normality nor magic) but also several of the inhuman traits they displayed. Horns, bizarre skin colors, and just plain weird physical features. One of them had six arms. Six arms! Another seemed to have two heads. A third individual was simply covered in spines, spines that changed shape, grewlarger, grew smaller, turned sharper, smoother... very bizarre. Harry distantly noticed a rather large number of stone statues littering the area, though he only realized the grey powder everywhere was the remnants of yet more statues when a strike from the snake's tail smashed a pair of statues into dust.
At this point Harry was seriously reconsidering his "Investigate the noises and help if there's trouble" plan in favor of an idea that went something like "Run. Very quickly."
"What are you DOING?"
Uh oh.