Decryption

Punk deciphered the magic array before him even faster than he had expected, but that was absolutely not because the caster's methods were particularly brilliant...

Admittedly, the Legendary magic array at the ruins' entrance was not an especially troublesome type. It was merely "a defensive array nested within a hidden array, with an alarm array hidden inside the defensive array, followed by three entirely different encryption arrays, each of which had a misdirection array embedded within it"... that was all?

Fine, this damned "embedded triple-joint replicated array system" had thoroughly stumped the caster. In theory, cracking an array of this caliber should have been child's play with the knowledge in Archmage Wedraxia's memories, but when it came to actually putting that knowledge into practice, even Punk's spellcasting abilities left him completely at a loss...

According to the Enchantment theory Wedraxia had studied, the most basic requirement for cracking such a magic array was mastering a series of Legendary Enchantment School spells, then deciphering it through the exquisite coordination of multiple Enchantment School spells specifically designed to break magic arrays. Generally speaking, that was the only way to disable the array without triggering the alarm. Yet Punk could only instant-cast the Conjuration spells he excelled at. Trying to decipher this array using only basic Enchantment fundamentals was simply too difficult for him. By the Legendary Mage's own estimate, even if he spent several centuries learning as he went, his chance of success would be less than thirty percent.

There was no helping it. As a caster who specialized in Conjuration and minored in Alchemy and Divination, Punk's level of Enchantment studies did not even qualify as "average." Before the Archmages of the Netheril era who excelled at crafting magic arrays, receiving a "passable" assessment would already have been generous.

Magic was