Naruto : The Groundhog Exam

Chapter 3

The orange-clad Uzumaki was very used to dealing with life by the seat of his pants, reacting to things as they came at him and living a life free of worries or concerns about trivial issues like tact and timing.

Well, guess what? That all came to a screeching halt as he discovered he was trapped in a time loop. It's difficult if not impossible for a person to have an unplanned reaction to something he knows is going to happen. Especially when it happens the same way over, and over, and over again.

Impulsive reactions don't happen anymore in that case.

Recklessly charging ahead filled with passion only worked when you could feel passion over something. Having seen the same thing happen countless times kinda took the bite out of it, and knowing that however it turned out made no difference in the morning make reckless fury and passion almost nonexistent no matter how willing you were to summon them.

No, it was the sort of situation that demanded carefully thought out plans, "When this happens I'll do that and see what happens" was the least of the strategies that could be employed to learn from the situation. Far more valuable was deciding what goal you wanted to pursue, then going for it.

Being caught in a situation where careful memorization and planning made the only difference was both torture for Naruto, and the best thing that could possibly happen to him, forcing him to put his disused mind to work and at the same time training him to effectively use it.

The demon container was, by sheer trial and error, learning the scientific method by simple, practical experience. "I want this to happen, and I believe that it would result from my doing that. No? Well, then maybe this other."

It had taken him several attempts, but he HAD successfully memorized the answers for the written portion of the chunin test. Now Hinata no longer worried about him failing.

No, now he had to worry about something worse. Every time they got through the test she'd ask him how he did it, admitting that she, herself, had to rely on her bloodline technique to spy out someone else's answers.

Every time he came up with a lie about how he'd spied them out himself, she'd grow excited and ask for more details, and always grew so disappointed when his clumsy structure of lies collapsed and revealed he'd been fibbing.

Telling the truth was almost worse. If he told her how he'd memorized the answers, she'd ask how he knew them beforehand, then he'd be stuck either in another haphazard structure of lies she'd uncover through interested and eager questions, or a truth that she would not believe, one that made her feel he was not only lying, but trying to hide something from her.

Either way, his clumsy attempts at explanations hurt her.

Hurting Hinata made Naruto feel terrible. The more time he spent with her, the more he realized how important he was to her, and the more of a cad to shatter her illusions of him.

So, in desperation, having freshly come from a branch of one of those conversations where Sakura had been boasting over how she'd solved it all herself, without cheating, as a way of pointing out to their teams how much smarter she was than Naruto (before immediately asking Sasuke for a date), the blond genin had gone off to find Iruka.

On locating his old teacher, the boy had shoved the test paper in his face and demanded, "Show me how to answer these problems!"

Chuckling, his old academy instructor did so, starting at the very beginning and leading Naruto through step by step, and confusing him to death not ten seconds into the explanation.

Seeing that, they started over.

Naruto's brain hurt, and he was concentrating as hard as he knew how. The lessons took forever, going over the most basic parts of the easiest problem repeatedly, but slowly how it all worked began to take root.