By the time I was done with every minor invasion and spirit who thought they could attack Earth in our time of weakness, two days had passed. Two days of spell-casting, two days of co-ordinating other sorcerers and most importantly fighting.

I had cast the [Wind of Kado] more times than I could count. But that didn't mean the fights were hard. They were just—tedious.

Yes, tedious. Interdimensional invasion armies were tedious. Mostly because the idiots committing to an invasion of earth before bothering to learn more about the new sorcerer supreme were more than often unthinking armies of magical or demonic spirits. The key to that statement being the word unthinking.

They would rush us in a straight line no matter what kind of opposition we put down. They were more magical phenomena than anything "real". And the shapes of creatures and monsters they took, merely an automatic adaptation of that maligned mana.

Sorcerers had existed for millennia at this point and sling rings had been part of Kamar-Taj's standard curriculum for a good part of it. So, we were good, really good at using portals for war. Good enough that I wondered how long an average student would take to finish portal gameplay.

It was a joy to see them cut loose, especially after I told them that I knew [Greater Chained Casting]. I was able to share my mana pool with them and they got up to some crazy stuff.

Like opening a portal from under the Mariana trench, Dropping heavy items using perfectly placed portals, Portals to outer space, micro-portals in front of charging behemoths and even the ever-reliable 'closing the portal as the enemy is passing through it' trick. One guy, Taniguchi, a former electrical engineer even suggested doing some fun stuff with magnets and portals to create magic railguns.

Sure it might take more time to set up than just casting a spell that essentially does the same thing but that would be honestly more fun. I wrote that down on the idea board to work on when we had actual time.

Outside of occasional combat and some warding work, my main job ended up being keeping up the morale. A task my gift wasn't particularly helpful at but one I liked to think I did a pretty good job at considering that my previous leadership experience boiled down to leading a development project at work for the newly hired interns.

As for my status as the newly selected Sorcerer Supreme, most of everything seemed to be going well. I had thought that I would have to contend with disciples insisting that I was unfit for being a sorcerer supreme but they were largely positive about me being the one.

The biggest thorn in my side from Kamar-Taj were the old guys. The great-masters. The people who were used to the Ancient One and how things were done around here. None of them really objected to me being the sorcerer supreme to my face but a good portion of them were extremely skeptical of my declaration of war against Dormammu.

I appreciated their caution, but it was the one thing I was not going to budge on. I would listen to any concerns if they bought them up to me but for now, I was certain.

—

Back to the fights and the near-endless hordes of magical beasts.

It was the repetition that was wearing us down more than any perceived difficulty in fights. And from what I could learn, this has been the status quo of Earth's mystical landscape for a good long time only exacerbated at this moment due to one of our sanctums going down for a moment and the ancient one's passing.

I added upgrading global mystical protection arrays to my list of things to do. The only question was, where would I learn how to do it?

The fights weren't all tiresome though. I gained a few dozen new spells and skills, one of which was [Osthiontic Necromancy]. I didn't know the specifics of it yet but if the "people" I learned it from were of any indication, then It meant skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons. The insights I got from the Skill told me the same thing.

That wasn't all. I now knew all forms of modifications that can be done to a portal, from creating portals the size of an Atom to creating ones that should be able to swallow a building whole.

I also knew how to form [Pacts] now. I could now make pacts, given freely or forced with all forms of mystical beasts. I thanked the behemoth that had been leading a goblin army we had spaghettified with micro-portals for teaching me how.

And last but not least, now I knew a very peculiar ritual. The second ritual I now knew in fact. I had learned it from not a mystical army but from watching a recording of all things.

[Ritual Learned: Call of the machine spirit. (Lesser)]

I had learned it after seeing this world's version of Vision battle against Ultron, who I was supposed to believe had come and gone. I would have to meet Vision, I decided. If only to learn if Ultron was taken care of but also to improve the [Ritual] I had gained.

The Invasions slowed down to a degree that I could get some shut-eye. Spells that helped with sleep deprivation only went so far and I refused to use [Chronomancy] on my mind without further experimentation. I walked towards my bed and went to sleep for the first time in almost 50 hrs.

I slept that night dreaming of grand cosmic fights and the mundane responsibilities that awaited me.

—

I woke up the next day after some shut-eye feeling barely not-dead.

"I have to figure out some sort of a time chamber,"

I told myself and added that to the to-do list on my phone. I then spent some time thinking about introducing Jira or some other project management software to Kamar-Taj.

The thought of having to teach the isolationist faction within Kamar-Taj how to use something like that gave the small chuckle necessary to start the day.

Today's most important task was un-freezing the time-locked victims.

I felt like I knew enough about chronomancy and had enough of a grasp of [Boon of the Dark Dimension] to give it a shot. I sent Stark a text using my new phone and started the tests I had to do. I knew [Biological Chronomancy] but I had to take it to the next level.

No, I didn't use my own hands as the test subject, that would be the stupidest thing I could do. My target was a pine tree. I cast the spell and checked if I could selectively move time forward for a single leaf.

It didn't work the first time I tried but it did the third time. I performed a few more tests, I even turned back time for a mouse I had found. It was only after that I finally focused on my hands.

[Skill Upgrade: Single Stream Chronomancy (Local) - Multi-Stream Chronomancy (Local)]

[Skill Upgrade: Biological Chronomancy - Greater Biological Chronomancy]

[Skill Created: Fragmentary Biological Chronomancy]

I loved my gift.

With assurance from it and my new insights into the mysticism of time, I cast the necessary spellwork on my hands. I felt that getting the arm fixed should have taken more work or at least come with more fanfare. But by the end of the process, my hands no longer shook.

—

I walked out of the New York sanctum towards the affected buildings. Wong and the rest can take care of running the sanctum in my absence.

I had to mediate a debate on whether or not to mind wipe the normies once I was back, I wasn't looking forward to that debate to put it lightly.

The area around the sanctum was empty of traffic and people. There was a government helicopter up above doing things government helicopters did. I sigh to myself, my daydream of a magitech Terran utopia might have to wait.

I recast [Obscuration] on the sanctum and flew up towards the affected building.

—

Only to be met with a surprise I really should have expected.

"Stark, you couldn't help yourself from fiddling with frozen people, I see."

"I like to think of it as me trying my best to save these poor people. But I understand if the magic voodoo people have a hard time knowing what empathy is."

"Of course, the great Tony Stark's only motivation in fiddling with time-locked people is Empathy. There is no intellectual curiosity or maybe even a bit of ego to be soothed."

At that, he stopped fiddling with his machine. There were three red boxes emitting some sort of energy onto a desk and he was in the middle of calibrating a computer that was obviously connected to them. I had to say, I was extremely impressed with how fast he had built it. That was Reed Richards speed, not Tony Stark speed.

It was a surprise to learn that this world had no F4. Had Tony Stark being the richer genius simply eaten the poorer genius?

"You really have to stop smirking at terrible jokes you come up with in your mind."

"The sorcerer supreme makes no jokes."

"Aha."

I quickly change the subject, I was not going to wear an illusion to mask my embarrassing personal habits.

"So, how far did you get with your inferior scientific doodahs?"

Instead of answering my question he shifted his position and looked straight at me.

"You know, I was looking into you and I found something really funny. You—refused to treat my friend, Rhodey."

It might have been a small irrelevant aside or it might have meant something more. I didn't know and couldn't tell from his tone. But I was instantly on edge.

Now I could go full paranoia and try to figure out if the question was a trap using magic. Some chronomancy and Astral projecion would do it.

But—I looked over at his tech all around me, at the tech I didn't instinctively fully understand the purpose of. That in itself might be where the real trap was hidden.

I crossed my hands.

"What about it, Stark? Don't tell me you think I was unique in how my patients were selected or that I curated the patients I worked with and didn't. You know how the medical industry works."

There was a beat of silence after I replied in the vaguest terms possible. I needed technopathic Spells and Skills.

"I supposed, you don't."

Soon it was like the subject wasn't even bought up. Tony started speaking enthusiastically about how he had managed to make progress into the chronal anomaly detectors and the brute force method he was using to push them from the current timestream.

It was going well. While he hadn't managed to isolate even inanimate objects front he temporal effect but he had managed to find out that the temporal effects were unevenly distributed due to the stretching of time-space.

A conclusion I had come to as well.

"How does your detector work?"

"I'm glad you want to hear what I have to say. So, the beautiful machine is based on the principles of gravitational wave detection. You see, when massive objects like black holes collide, they produce ripples in the fabric of space-time. These ripples are known as gravitational waves"

"I am a sorcerer, but I used to be a medical professional, cut the pop-science bullshit. How does it actually work?"

I was asking for the sake of knowing how far my gift would extend my knowledge.

He spread his arms.

"Now that's the attitude I wanna hear. I guess we don't just have magnificent beards in common, eh?"

"If you are talking of ego Stark, know that I am entirely behind you in that particular subject"

"Whatever you tell yourself, man. Temporal anomalies can also produce ripples in the space-time continuum. But they're much more subtle, so we needed to create a device that could pick up on those small variations. That's where the temporal anomaly detector comes in. It uses a highly sensitive interferometer that I've rigged. The displacement modules, I got to them by working sideways from the current problem."

Seeing I was following, he started speaking in more and more technical jargon and to mine and his surprise—I was able to follow along well enough.

Up to a point that is. I lost him when he started talking about non-linear imaginary matrice integrals and the chronal algorithms he had developed.

The fucker was smug by the time the explanation ended at me not following. I guess that's another item on my to-do list. Get better at tech-assisted time manipulation than Stark, but I knew it won't be done soon.

So it was time to show off what I really could do.

"Fascinating stuff. But at the end of it all, pointless."

He rolled his eyes. He had no real appreciation for the simple dramatics of life that kept it from becoming joyless.

"So you have the answer?"

"Observe. The Eye of Aga—" Then I catch myself looking at all the equipment near me and he rolls his eyes again. "You know what? Let's do it away from your machines."

"Don't believe a fellow superhero? I am hurt. Hurt, I tell you."

I dropped the phoney sorcerer speech and flew out.

"Not a superhero, dude."

I teleported out of the building. I flew above even the hovering helicopter. S.H.I.E.L.D. had shut down and the government was in the middle of figuring out an alternative.

I opened the Eye of Agamoto, calculated every minor adjustment I would need to make to the spell to discount for the dark dimension's physics Kaecilius had bought upon and shaped my mana.

When I let go, pieces of the world went back in time

—

I didn't have to check up on the unfrozen people to know that they were well. I knew with certainty that they were. The spell had worked as intended.

The only minor hiccup I had was that I refused to be held responsible if Tony figures out time travel from the data he just gathered.

[Skill Consolidation: Fragmentary Biological Chronomancy + Greater Biological Chronomancy + Multi-Stream Chronomancy: Superior Chronomancy!]

Maybe it was the jargon talk or maybe it was me flexing magical muscles on such a scale that did it. My chronomantic skills consolidated into one. Suddenly I knew even more about Chronomany than I knew ever before. Enough that I now didn't need the infinity stone to perform it.

I smiled and created a portal back to Kamar-Taj. I had a mystical debate to settle.

—

AN: I didn't want to the "system" stuff too complicated. Here are the details for anyone who actually cares about the barebones of what I have. I might or might not bring it up in the story later. So don't read the rest if you don't want to spoil any mystery to be had from the "system".

Each spell, skill, ritual etc.. will have 5 tiers.

Lesser
Default (the ones with no adjectives)
Greater
Superior
Ultimate

And here are the types:

Spells: Specific magical actions.
Skills: General magical actions. Can be a general branch of magic.
Crafts: Permanent enchantments, magical blueprints, general knowledge of magitech etc…
Pacts: Basically magical summons.
Rituals: It's rituals. Different from crafts because—it just is alright.

They will consolidate, upgrade, specialize and do other stuff depending on what he focuses on.