On the nights that Mina trained, the nights she needed sleep the most, her nightmares were more regular and worse. They always involved fighting and death, and always had Mina waking up sweating and then whimpering into her pillow.
At those times Mina would realize with dread that that carnage was what she was preparing for. She took so many hard hits each training session that she never had a pain free day. It was worse than she could have imagined, and she knew that it was nothing at all compared to what she would be forced to face when Beryl resurfaced.
Though Artemis was unsympathetic during their training, taking no excuses and pushing Mina to her limits every time, outside of training he was always ready to listen, to explain, to assure Mina that everything would be ok, to be cuddled when she needed to hold something warm and fluffy, and to lick her tears away when she cried.
It was his companionship that kept Mina sane during those first weeks of the Spring term. She could still snap at people over very little, but she was doing that less than she had in November and December. Having someone to talk to about her problems went a long way towards calming her down.
But Artemis couldn't help her with her flying. Cedric Diggory had seen the match between Slytherin and Ravenclaw during the first week of term and had determined that Slytherin, which had won, would have a huge advantage over Hufflepuff because every player on the Slytherin team had a Nimbus 2001 broomstick, the second fastest kind in the world. As a result he insisted on having many Quidditch practices even though Hufflepuff's next game would not come for months.
Mina's flying was still decent, but sub par for her as sitting on her broomstick was made more difficult by the soreness she usually had from her nights in the room of requirement. The difference was enough to be noticed by Diggory, who insisted on even more practices as a result to get her back into shape.
So between training with Artemis and Quidditch practice Mina had little time for her homework and her grades were still suffering even though she was focusing much better than she had at the end of the previous semester.
Still, she was improving. Her aim with the crescent beam and the compact got progressively better (and the walls of the room of requirement seemed to self-repair when they were away, much to Mina's relief) though the latter was not used as much as it needed to be recharged after Mina had opened it in the first session. Mina was also getting better at blocking the attacks of the dummies, though anything would have been an improvement over her first few tries.
It wasn't long before Artemis thought he knew enough about magic to begin to work it into the training regimen. First he had her try out this spell he had found, the reductor curse on a pair of stone tables. The result was the appearance of a large crack in the side of one of the tables.
"Now transform and try it again."
After transforming Mina pointed her wand at the other table and shouted "reducto!"
The table exploded with a shockwave powerful enough to know both Mina and Artemis over. It wasn't the falling down that hurt so much as how loud the explosion was. Their ears were both ringing terribly. The entire mass of the stone table had been reduced to a cloud of dust that was so thick it was difficult to see through. It burned their throats and stung their eyes.
Artemis jumped on Mina's shoulder and motioned towards the doorway, signaling that it was time to leave. Neither could speak loudly because of the dust cloud or hear softer sounds because of the explosion.
Back in the Hufflepuff dormitory, where their ears had a chance to recover, Artemis was very pleased.
"I thought so." he whispered on the off chance that someone might come by and overhear them. When you transform your magical abilities also become much more powerful. This will prove very useful in battle."
"Artemis," Mina asked, "I had more abilities in my visions. There were attacks that could go though an army of monsters, and a big glowing sword."
"The sword is the weapon of the leader of the Sailor Soldiers. You haven't fully transformed yet. That's why you can't use Sailor Venus' most powerful moves or the sword. When you do I expect your spells become even more powerful than they are now."/
Mina had been worried about Filch or one of the teachers finding out how she was using the room of requirement, but never thought that Harry Potter of all people would notice that she was sneaking off to the seventh floor.
One care of magical creatures class Harry asked her "Is Mina short for something?"
"Minako. Why?"
"Just wondering." Harry was not going to tell her about the map he had acquired, the one that showed the location of every person in Hogwarts. He sometimes stayed up to look at it to see what Professor Dumbledore or other teachers were doing, and had noticed the name 'Minako Aino' moving along the seventh floor pretty often. Discretion regarding the map won out over his curiosity about what she was up to./
Diggory had the whole Hufflepuff team watch the game that Gryffindor played against Ravenclaw. Word had leaked that Harry Potter had acquired a Firebolt, the single fastest broom in the world, and Diggory wanted to impress on his team the difference having a great broom can make. Gryffindor won handily, ending any hopes Ravenclaw had of winning that year's cup. Gryffindor still had one more game to play against Slytherin before the finals, but they would have to win by more than 250 points to face Hufflepuff for the championship.
At the game certain students, including Draco Malfoy, had dressed up as dementors to try to distract Harry from the match. Harry had shot his patronus at them, a giant silver thing far more impressive than anything Mina had been able to produce during her lessons with Professor Lupin.
That night, during training, Mina attempted the patronus charm while transformed. The result was a glowing silver mass far more substantial than what she would have been able to create in her normal form. But she still thought that it was not as good as the one that Harry had been able to produce./
The next day a change had come over the school. Teachers were seen in the corridors more and seemed tenser. Filch was boarding up passageways, and Professor Flitwick was teaching the front doors to recognize Sirius Black. The word spread like wildfire.
Sirius Black had broken into Gryffindor tower with a knife.
The details were varied and wild. Apparently Black had stolen a sheet with the Gryffindor passwords and awoken one of the students by slashing a curtain with a knife. The student saw him, yelled out, and Black fled.
No one was hurt, but Mina was still concerned about Harry, who had now obviously been targeted twice. She voiced this concern to him two days later at the end of their next care for magical creatures class, asking him if he was all right, but had not expected his hands to clench in a barely concealed rage.
"He was there." Harry muttered. "Right there. And I didn't know it. I couldn't do anything."
"What could you have done?"
"Kill him." Harry said a little too matter-of-factly.
"What? Harry, you can't want to fight a serial killer just because-"
"He's done much more than that!" Harry hissed.
Mina was horrified at this strange change in Harry. She couldn't bring herself to ask what Black had done though, the possibilities in her head being too horrible, and ran over to Hagrid's hut for her usual visits with the gamekeeper and Buckbeak.
Ron had been a bit behind them as he had taken longer to gather his stuff. "Hey!" he yelled after Mina. "What about me? I was the one who was attacked!"
"She knows about Black trying to kill me." Harry told him. It didn't stop Ron from being annoyed that Harry had gotten some of the attention Ron had been receiving the past few days. He never got to vent his annoyance, however.
"She knows about that, too?"
The boys turned around to see Hermione Granger, who had herself turned to look back at Mina. She shook her head and walked past Harry and Ron to the castle.
"I'm getting another one of those feelings about Hermione not telling us something." Ron said./
"So this is the second time this Black has broken into the castle?" Artemis asked.
"Yeah. He wants to kill Harry Potter."
"Twice in a few months, with no sign that the dementors noticed him coming or going, and no sign that he's been in the Hogsmeade village. I think he's been hiding in the grounds the whole time."
"Where on the grounds could he hide from the dementors?"
"I don't know. Maybe the forest? I think I should start checking the grounds myself. There are things a cat can do that even wizards can't."
"Let me know if you find him."
Artemis looked into Mina's eyes, which had become hard and determined. "You want to fight him yourself?"
"You bet I do. The life of a friend of mine is at stake. And for all I know he's going to look for this maniac himself."
Artemis smiled. "That's the attitude I want to see from the leader of the Sailor Soldiers."/
Harry didn't react that way in the book, but in the extended scenes of the movie he was upset that he had missed a chance to kill Black and I liked the idea enough to put it in.