Poorly worded, but it must be understood that the characters are not sequential (consecutive characters are A, then B, then C, and so on)

This requirement makes no sense to me:

Paths will not necessarily be sequential (characters can be skipped).

Does it mean that points in a path must not be connected with each other? But this 1) contradicts test cases, 2) makes grid representation useless - the kata then is just "find longest lexicographically ordered substring in a string".

After solving it I feel more like "paths must be proper sequential paths with every point adjacent to previous and next ones".