3 3 Asking Anko

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.

The next day, he was boasting to Hinata that he'd solved them himself, only for her to confess, shyly, that she'd only answered them by cheating, then asking him for help in understanding them.

After floundering around for a bit, he went back to Iruka so that he'd look less of a fool to Hinata. And, well, the more he knew the more she asked and the more he had to bug Iruka to help him understand them, until Naruto had the ability to pass that test without having memorized the answers.

A good thing for him was he had all of the time in the world to get it right. A BAD thing for his immediate plans was that Iruka was a teacher, and as such he had no intention whatsoever of taking any shortcuts. He was not out to train ANYONE to solve only one problem, he was out to get them to have the concepts down, so they could solve any and all like them, and in some cases know the history and background behind them, which led into all sorts of closely related issues which had to be discussed in detail.

So in spite of himself Naruto was finally picking up some portion of an official shinobi education.

Soon those conversations with Hinata were growing so long Sakura was overhearing them, and hearing Naruto talk about those subjects like he knew anything about them first got met by disbelief, so she pressed him, and when he could answer successfully he IMPRESSED her!

Naruto LIKED impressing Sakura, and nothing he'd ever done before had done it. He also found it impressed Iruka and Hinata, too. Unfortunately for him, he liked it so much he couldn't help but lunge ahead for more, so did some extra studying just to have verbal ammo for impressing them further.

Only this backfired from the start, as each tried to test his knowledge of certain subjects he HADN'T studied, just to determine the breadth of his surprising education, and he kept floundering as they kept hitting topics he hadn't studied yet. Once Sakura hit a subject he knew nothing about she was smug, having validated her opinion of him as a moron (which he hated) but once Iruka found an area of ignorance he was disappointed in Naruto (which the boy also hated). And both were in the habit of testing topic after topic until they found something he didn't know about; not maliciously, just out of disbelief, "You mean you actually know something? You were paying attention when we talking about... well then what about.." etc, etc, etc.

Having found something they never supposed (Naruto's 'hidden' knowledge) they kept probing to find the ends of it, and naturally he kept expanding it as they came up with questions concerning things he didn't understand.

Naruto LIKED impressing people, and didn't get to do it nearly often enough. Soon he found that the more he knew the more he impressed those three, triggering a near endless cycle, as pretty soon Sakura and Hinata were *expecting* him to know things in the later parts of the exam. In the forest, his teammate would quip things like - "Oh, Naruto can find those. He was just telling me about the properties of certain mushrooms..." and so forcing the boy to learn yet more.

But that was getting just a wee bit ahead of our story.

Not long after he had started to memorize the test answers Naruto came up with why his endlessly repeating day had advanced to the Forest of Death that once.

It was simple - every time he passed the written test, the next day found his personal timeline actually advancing one day. On days when he failed any part of the chunin exam, he'd wake up the next morning starting it all over at the beginning again.

That much he was able to figure out, and it wasn't like it was easy to miss, since it started occurring regularly once he'd figured out the hurdles to pass to get by the written exam.

From there it was an easy guess that to get out of this cycle, all he'd have to do was pass the chunin exams in their entirety, and probably he'd have to do something about the invasion, too.

The last was even more of a sticky problem than the first, and the first was no picnic by itself, either. It surprised him, going over it again and again, just how far he'd gotten the first time on sheer luck, when that luck was most definitely NOT going his way on any subsequent attempts!

Any simple thing seemed to trip him up and get he and his team failed.

Well, I don't suppose you could call being killed by Orochimaru simple, but when they entered the forest, it almost invariably happened that ONE of them would get killed by that amazing missing ninja.

Naruto, quite frankly, had no idea how they'd gotten by the first time. It had all been done on impulse - impulses which he could not recall, so he was stuck trying to do it over again, and somehow he kept messing things up to where the Snake Sannin would kill him, or kill Sakura, or kill Sasuke, or all of them.

Waking up after dying was a shock the once, but after that it quickly grew fairly routine. You did it frequently in battle with a legendary missing ninja.

After having been stuck in a day and a half loop for what felt like months, the blond demon container had to admit at last that nothing he did seemed to be able to get he and his team by the amazing snake guy with his hicky of death. It didn't matter if he fought, tried to evade the sannin or spammed the world with clones disguised as his team and raced toward the tower, one of his team would always die, and it was usually him, which sucked.

So it was time to consider other options.

Naruto's usual approach to his day had settled into something of a routine. In the morning of his first day he would ask Hinata out, and after the test they would go out to eat together, where several kunoichi would hang around and watch them, at first in disgust, but as he improved later in giggling glee.

After lunch he would get himself scolded by Ino or Sakura on whatever he'd done wrong, until those two couldn't think of anything (and both girls had begun looking at him with their jaws hanging open). So he'd begun to ask questions of the other kunoichi present, until he was fairly sure those dates were going okay.

Okay, however, was not enough. So after those meals he'd pester the Hokage to introduce him to Kurenai, whose lectures had started to make sense.

It felt GREAT to the genin to actually start to be able to get a handle on something! And though the restaurants progressed in quality, none of the ones that would let him in the door were very good. So for the moment he was stuck, without a good idea how to improve those, and Hinata-chan kept nervously fidgeting during those meals, anxiously watching their audience.

It was something he'd have to work on, as he wanted those dates to go well.

After his dates with Hinata, Naruto generally had a conversation where he impressed Iruka, Sakura or Hinata with his 'hidden' knowledge, and then spent the rest of that day studying what they'd asked about that he didn't know yet.

The next morning, they'd go to the Forest of Death, someone would get killed by Orochimaru, and he'd start all over again. On days when he wasn't the one dying, he'd often leave the forest and try to get someone to train him, but people were so upset over the news of Orochimaru's return and busy dealing with it that no one could spare him any time.

After having exhausted all of the ways he could think of to escape or defeat the Snake Sannin, and coming up with nothing that worked, Naruto decided that a change was in order. And what change he used was based on one of the standard shinobi sayings he'd just recently memorized: "Know thy enemy and know thyself, and you need not fear a hundred battles. Know thyself but not thy enemy, and the outcome is always in doubt. Know neither yourself nor your enemy, and defeat is certain."

Well, Naruto figured he knew himself pretty well. After all, what was there to know? And he was the expert on him anyway. That made it pretty obvious what he had to learn.

So, the next morning of the written test, he went into the test center as usual and shouted, "Oy! Kabuto! What do those nin-cards say about Orochimaru?"

The silver haired genin blinked several times, as did his fellows, but withdrew the appropriate information card anyway. "The legendary Snake Sannin of Konoha, now an S-rank missing ninja. One of the strongest ninja ever to live, he is Kage-rank in most areas, but his specialty is ninjutsu, and his stated goal is to learn all of the ninja techniques in the world. I don't know much about why he was thrown out, or his missions, but his jonin instructor was Sarutobi, our current Hokage, and his teammates were Jiraiya, the Toad Sannin, and Tsunade, the Slug Sannin. That's probably all we'll need to know if there are any questions about this historical figure."

"Huh? I didn't know the old pervert was a teammate of the tongue freak," Naruto mumbled, causing several of those around him to face-flop. "And I'd never heard of this Slug-Lady. Do you think either of them could train me to beat up old Snake-face?"

"OF COURSE NOT! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING! THEY ARE THE LEGENDARY THREE SANNIN! YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A DEAD-LAST! DON'T ASK SUCH STUPID QUESTIONS!" Sakura lost her temper to shriek at him, bonking him on the head for such presumption.

Kabuto looked on with some amusement, folding away his nin-cards. "I don't think any of them would be willing to train you, Uzumaki. But supposedly, the three Sannin are fairly evenly balanced. According to what I've heard, at the time he left, Jiraiya could still beat Orochimaru if they fought, but his toad summons would be beaten by Orochimaru's snakes. Tsunade would have lost in a fight with him, but her slugs could beat the snake summons. So really, it would take two of them to beat the third. But it doesn't matter anyway, after Orochimaru left the village, the other two disappeared also."

"Huh?" Naruto almost blurted out that the old guy was in town right now peeping on women's bath houses. He knew, one of his clones had run into him one morning while searching for Hinata.

He spent the next few days seeking out the old pervert, only the old guy was so reluctant to teach him anything that they spent the full day arguing about it and Naruto didn't learn anything.

So, in desperation, Naruto began to fail the written test on purpose, flipping off the instructors, obviously copying off of others, and as that grew boring, he began to grow steadily more outrageous, climbing up on his desk, dropping his pants to moon the entire room (with the test answers written on his bum for good measure), and at last, opting to follow a suggestion given by one of the girls who'd observed their dates, turning to Hinata and loudly suggesting, "Hey, Hinata-chan! Let's make out!"

After her stunned, rosy, shy and nearly silent exclamation of, "A... alright," he then proceeded to kiss her before the audience of genin, causing Sakura to rise up in her seat, face flushed and vein throbbing, to shout at him.

"NARUTO! DON'T DO THAT HERE!" Then her jaw dropped as Naruto did so anyway. It wasn't a very good kiss, but Hinata started to enjoy it. When the pink haired demoness started to shout for them to stop it, however, Team 7 got thrown out.

Naruto's purposes in flubbing the test deliberately were easy enough to describe. The first was to get in some sparring with Sasuke, who'd try to hurt him for having failed so deliberately, and learning to predict and evade those blows was always interesting until he got upset enough to turn his Sharingan on. But mostly he did it because, when he failed the test, Sarutobi gave him a letter to give to Ebisu, who'd teach him something.

The special jonin wasn't on a level with the Sannin, but neither was Naruto, and the blond boy was just getting sick and tired of asking the old pervert for help, only to be snubbed in reply.

The old guy wouldn't even let him sign the toad scroll again, and without that Naruto couldn't summon any!

He was so angry he'd forgotten how he'd convinced the old guy to teach him in the first place, by adopting his Sexy technique to turn into a pretty girl and ask nicely. So he was left with Ebisu, who was clearly second rate by comparison, but still much better than training on his own.

So he filled his afternoons and evenings with training under Ebisu, even going so far as to not walk somewhere if he could run on the walls, and floating a leaf above his head while others were talking, just to fill in the corners and take advantage of all the spare moments during his dull repeating life.

Naruto had long since lost count of the days, he'd not paid any attention to counting them in the beginning anyway. But he guessed it was on the order of a couple months or so before Ebisu pronounced his chakra control, "Decent, almost average. It is not your worst flaw, which is not what I was expecting given what I'd been told," and proceeded to teach him something else.

The blond genin got all excited at that moment, but what Ebisu taught turned out to be the basic Clone technique - not refinements to the Shadow Clone, but the ordinary Academy level ninja technique everybody had to learn.

The boy groaned, but persevered.

By now Naruto had discovered through hard experience that the easiest way around an obstacle was sometimes through it. It was just easier to learn a basic something than it was to argue in favor of getting something cool and useful, because he could either spend a whole day arguing, and learn nothing, or just grit his teeth and learn it, then the next time prove he knew it so he could learn something else instead.

That cycle had happened several times during his chakra control training.

True to form Ebisu wouldn't teach him anything else until he had the basic Clone technique mastered, and then refined up to a level where it was almost impressive. At first Naruto hated spending time on his worst technique when he could have been doing something useful instead, and only put up with it because that was the only way he'd found to get the special jonin who was his teacher to move on. But after a while Ebisu explained how a smart ninja could use both together - a Shadow Clone was solid but vanished after the first hit, while normal Clones, being just illusions, couldn't do much of anything BUT take hits. And they wouldn't vanish when struck, so could take blow after blow if you could trick an enemy into wasting that much attention on them.

So if he was just going to use them for target practice, or as distractions to draw fire (which was, admittedly, most of what Naruto'd already used clones for) ordinary Clones had a place, especially if he mixed ordinary and Shadow Clones into a bunch, so an enemy couldn't know which were solid, and could hurt them, as opposed to those that were mere illusions and couldn't be disrupted by something so simple as a blow, but could otherwise be ignored.

So the Shadow Clones would last longer if they were mixed in and among the ordinary Clones, not granting an enemy a clear of idea of which to strike in order to take out the dangerous ones. Thus, between them, they'd cost an enemy more time and effort dealing with the distraction.

Convinced of the utility of this strategy, Naruto practiced and practiced until he could perform both ordinary and Shadow Clone techniques so close to each other they appeared in the same puffs of smoke, and with illusionary ones mixed among solids until there was no way of telling which was which.

Ebisu even pronounced it a potentially effective battle strategy, capable of being a useful deception, sowing confusion as well as causing damage.

The next time he tested this against Orochimaru it was true, but pointless, because as soon as the Snake Sannin realized that was what he was facing, he threw a massive, wide area jutsu that destroyed everything around them, and in the process killed all of the clones (and Sakura, once again causing their team to fail).

Carrying Sakura's broken, bloody body out of the Forest of Death for he forgot how many times had kind of dulled the blond's reaction to it. They took her to the Konoha morgue, and the blond genin had the appropriate forms and paperwork filled out to inform her family and so on even before the door had finished swinging shut behind them.

They were, it must be admitted, far from the first or only genin team there. Seeing as how the morgue was attached to Konoha's general hospital they had all of the usual around town accidents to take care of, training accidents from newly minted genin all of the way up to a young and foolish jonin who nearly burned her own face off, through chronic ailments like that Hayate guy's coughs... and, the expected serious injuries and deaths caused by the rather extreme second test of the chunin exam.

It was a busy place, and Naruto was out of there before Sasuke had even sat down on a convenient bench to wait for them put the girl's body into a cooler for later autopsy.

Uzumaki, on the other hand, knew he'd be seeing her again tomorrow. Oh, he'd cried for her once, twice... he forgot how many times, even hugged her the next day until she'd smacked him, but she died so often in those fights it just didn't affect him anymore.

He'd died more often than she did, anyway, and she didn't get worked up over it the next day. Of course, she didn't remember it, but his emotions did not care about that. Emotions never do.

No, he had stuff to do.

Sakura was dead, which meant his team had failed. The times it was Sasuke's body in there he'd stick around to comfort Sakura (which was probably the only time she'd let him hug her without beating him for it), but since it was Sakura, the Uchiha would just go on brooding as usual; though, to be honest, it was maybe at a slightly more intense rate.

At least she hadn't choked to death on her own blood this time. Those were always horrible, especially the look in her eyes as it happened. And it always made him feel so guilty, every time she looked so surprised that he wasn't reacting more strongly to her grisly demise.

Shuddering at those memories, Naruto skipped along toward his destination, a place he had been many times, but only just begun to appreciate, the Konoha Public Library.

Under disguise, of course. They'd never let him in otherwise.

They had information on Orochimaru there. Oh, none of the classified stuff, but the publicly available information, which included all of the stuff Kabuto had said about him, plus some other facts and details.

Things like the names of his old students. Mizuki was one (big surprise there, Naruto knew he'd been a traitor since he'd tricked him into stealing the scroll of forbidden seals), another name had been blotted out of the one book on the Snake Sannin's genin team Naruto had been able to find.

But the last was still around. Old Snake-face had left his one-time apprentice in town, a special jonin by the name of Anko Mitarashi - the very same Anko who was proctor for the second test of the chunin exam!

It was amazing what you could read from books.

Creating hundreds of Shadow Clones, the kid began to look for her. Luckily for him, he was early enough she had not yet been informed of Orochimaru's return to town, and so he found her outside of the Forest of Death eating dango, and throwing the empty sticks to a tree where they embedded in the symbol for Konoha, a leaf.

Rushing up to face her, Naruto pointed a finger and the woman and shouted, "I need you to train me!"

Anko actually chuckled. "Oh? Failed already? I guess you do need training. But why do I need to be the one to train you, hmm?"

Breathing heavily from his run, Naruto panted, "If you do, I'll dedicate my life to defeating Orochimaru!"

At this the special jonin actually quirked a brow in interest. "Oh?" She rolled the idea around some in her mind, concluding it could actually be useful to have some help when she went after the old bastard. So she smirked, "Okay, kid, you've got my interest. Tell me what you know already. We'll see where we go from there."

Still panting from his long run, the boy nodded and declared, "Body Switch, Clone, Transformation, Sexy, Shadow Clone, and Harem techniques!"

Abruptly the special jonin's interest turned to amazed disgust. "That's it? How the fuck did you even get in the chunin exams? Forget it, kid. You'd never survive an encounter with the old bastard. Come back when you're older, and at least be sure to have some useful techniques next time."

"I already survived one fight with him earlier today!" the boy shouted, but this had the opposite effect than intended, getting her to abruptly demand where, then rush off to search for her old master herself.

None of his arguments swayed her, not even when he had a repeat of this same encounter before entering the forest, and without mentioning her old teacher.

Sadly disappointed, Naruto again started flubbing tests on purpose to go back to Ebisu, who so far had been the only teacher he could count on. Well, there was also Kurenai, but he could still hardly understand what she was saying half of the time - and he didn't understand how anything she said was going to help him defeat Orochimaru in any case.

Not that he could afford to get better clothes than he had on, anyway, even if they did what she said they did about making girls like him more. How was that going to matter, anyway?

So, getting another letter from Sarutobi, the demon container once again ventured over to where Ebisu would be, and once more submitted himself to the special jonin's tests to gauge his present skill level.

His spirit soared when, after submitting to the battery of demonstrations he required, the glasses wearing special jonin once more announced they'd be working on a technique!

Then Naruto slammed his face into his palm when Ebisu decided that what he needed to do was bring to full mastery his offensively crude Body Switch, also known as the Replacement technique