for real. the in-game timer pauses in the screen transition, but Flawless Essence's attack patterns don't. this means that for every room you clear, you save 10 frames (1/3 of a second) igt. if you die outside of the boss room (or a static fragment room), you gotta green flag. but if you do it flawlessly, you can save a few seconds.

here's dillen's tower tas, where inputs end at the start of essence and he gets 2:14 -

and in this tas i add my own inputs to do the 1ex wrong warp and complete 1ex inside the fight, and finish with a 2:11 -

and that's just 1ex, during the first of 6 attack patterns. a tas might be able to clear the entire static game before the fight is over, and a real-time run could probably clear a few screens of 1ex.

i might come back to this later

it gets better:

flawless essence takes damage when the Characters in Cutscenes sprite touches it (seen in a standard run as Eryn jumping up to hit it with her spear). turns out, the static fragments at the end of EX levels are also in that sprite. so you get to the end of 1EX, essence will touch the static fragment, and you can dash into it 4 times to skip most of the fight. then do the 2EX wrong warp and let the fight end.

this cuts a minute off of tower, and you only have to clear 1ex in the fight. i will definitely come back to this later

https://www.speedrun.com/chirpy_reverie/run/ydgxl9wy reposting the current tower wr to this forum thread so y'all can see how much faster this is. can be done in 1ex second room with the thing that shows you how to dash jump