Her next appearance was on a competition that combined extreme sports and intellectual challenges—The Gauntlet—a truly insane concoction of obstacle courses and brain-bending puzzles. No one expected her to make it far. After all, she wasn't exactly an athlete, but Kiri was never one to leave anything to chance.
When the first obstacle was revealed—a massive tower of mud and ropes—Kiri barely blinked. Most people would've panicked, but she only smiled. The trick wasn't to scale the tower. No, the trick was to make the other contestants believe they could. Kiri had a way of using her sheer willpower to break others down mentally before they even started the challenge. And when the whistle blew, she was already halfway up the tower.
"Stop looking up," Kiri muttered to the contestant behind her, "and start climbing. You're just making it harder on yourself."
When they didn't listen, she made sure to push every button. On the other side of the tower, she began to taunt.
"Can't get to the top? Guess that's where you belong."
One by one, the others faltered, hesitating. Kiri, on the other hand, made it to the top, leapt over the edge to the safety of the next challenge, and left the others scrambling. She didn't even break a sweat.
She'd won, again, but that wasn't the point. The point was how she'd made it happen.