Wily 2 - Rush Jet

This section features a death warp near the end that requires playing much of the stage on low health. It is not required, but does save about 16 seconds.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE EXTRA LIFE BEFORE YOU START TAKING DAMAGE.

This section is one long auto scroller. Be mindful that birds and worms do a whole bunch of damage. If you need to take only a little more damage before the end, use the wall climbers firing tiny green fireballs.

You are likely to get at least 3 friends to spawn during this section. Although collecting them may make killing enemies easier while you have low health, keep in mind this also produces more drops. You can also ignore them all together.

Remember if you take the death warp, your weapon energy will refill, so feel free to use anything you like in this section. Alternatively, remember to conserve Astro Crush if you do not have the extra life.

Astro Crush works as a nice screen clearing attack. Homing Sniper (Search Man) also works well for the bats at the end, to ensure they get hit and don't accidently kill Mega Man.

The Death Warp

After the zig zaggy flight section, there is a large health drop on the ground on a low platform. Just past this in the background is a small blue-violet square on a brown background structure. If you are death warping, position Mega Man on this square to immediately take damage when the dragon spawns.

You do not need to immediately take damage for the warp to work. You can take 2 or 3 hits (probably more) before dying and it still saves time.

As Cleartonic discovered, the checkpoint for the boss fight occurs around here. This death respawns you after the slow "speeding up" section going into the Bliking fight, optimally saving about 16 seconds.