Doomed to crumble unless we grow

In the wake of the blinding lights that had been flooding the night, the darkness that followed was deep and jarringly sudden. Replacing the rumble of the SUV's now dead engine, the sharp pop of gunfire continued only briefly, alongside the hurried shouts of the agents and the impact of two bodies colliding with force. A terrible, bone-deep bellow came from somewhere beneath the earth, shifting between a low, resonating roar and a wailing, rapidly undulating howl.

In the garage, Keedle was frantically dragging himself beneath the honda, wedging his small form under the partially collapsed vehicle as all hell broke loose a few yards behind him. "R-rath, now's the time to shed skin!" He rattled out between clattering teeth, "Get outside, through the side door! I'll c-cover ya!" And despite having ducked immediately for cover, the goblin was reaching back with one hand to dig into one of his many jacket pockets, while the other arm was being used to actively pull him in an crawl across the ground until he was partially shielded behind a tire.

Erathun felt his head swim as his hands and knees struck the cement, while the sting of his earlier scrape was well beyond sensation now. He'd flinched dramatically at the gunfire, and vaguely recalled hitting his head against the side of the car when the lights went fully out. He'd just gotten behind the honda when Keedle started shouting at him again. The goblin's voice barely registered above the pounding in his ears and the panicked, ragged breaths he was drawing in as fear engulfed him.

-R-rath, now's the time...!- Erathun hadn't caught all of what the little man was saying, but he heard enough. If only the terror of self preservation hadn't been so intense, the young dragon might have stopped to consider the confines of where he was, or what Keedle was rattling on about. But with bullets flying, and his own predatory senses screaming at him about a lurking danger beneath, Erathun acted on pure instinct. He didn't bother shedding his human clothes, and instead let them fray and burst apart under the sudden expanse of mass as he dropped his human guise and let his natural form break free. In a matter of seconds, fifty-one feet and several tons of green scale and dense muscle unfurled in the confines of the single-story garage, with golden wings buffeting the thick cloud of gray from the smoke bomb Keedle had deployed...

The smoke shield mattered little anyway, as the front end of the SUV, along with the four that had been near it before the lights cut out, had dropped downward into the earth as the ground gave way beneath them...