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Grisha Jeager was not one to get guests from outside of Shiganshina. The district was the very definition of a backwater, siting on the very edge of the walls, with little to offer itself, and that was before folks heard the rumors about the spiders. The rumors were highly exaggerated in Grisha's opinion. Contrary to popular notion, giant spiders did not stalk ever rooftop and lurk in every dark corner. In fact, most of the spiders you saw around were just tiny little things, barely worth noticing. But folks tended to get worked up over spiders, so most outsiders tended to avoid Shiganshina like the plague.
Therefore it was a surprise when he answered the door to find Andrew, a sort-of friend whom had done his doctors apprenticeship under the same master as Grisha.
"I was passing by the district and thought I'd stop in to say hello," the man offered up as explanation.
Well, there was a first for everything, Grisha supposed. There was no need to be a ungracious host after all. So he invited Andrew in, offered him a seat at the table, and set a kettle on the fire for tea.
"I'm surprised Grisha," Andrew said as he sat down. "You were one of our master's best students. I never thought you'd ever end up... well.. here."
"Well, you can never truly predict where life will take you," Grisha chuckled. "You see..."
"GRISHA!" Carla's scream echoed from the floor above, cutting off whatever Grisha was about to say. "THERE'S A SPIDER IN THE BATHROOM!"
Grisha bit back a curse. "Excuse me," he said through a strained smile. "It looks my wife needs some help." He pushed back his chair, grabbed the beat-up iron poker from its hook by the fireplace, and darted up the stairs. "CARLA?"
Now the walls in the Jeager's home were paper thin, so were the floors. Therefore, Andrew, who was left sitting at the table, could hear everything going on upstairs.
There was swearing, lots of it. Andrew had had absolutely no idea Grisha even knew those kinds of words, let alone what his wife apparently sported in her vocabulary. There were footsteps, one heavy, one lighter, and one that sounded like it belonged to something very big with lots of legs.
"SHIT! CARLA WATCH OUT, IT'S TRYING TO FLANK YOU!"
Bangs, crashes, more footsteps, the sound of something large and wooden being knocked over.
"OH NO YOU DON'T! GET OUT OF THERE! BACK! BACK! BACK!"
More crashes. The sound of something heavy and iron hitting flesh.
"DIE, DIE, DIE!"
Silence.
Andrew watched wordlessly as Grisha tromped back down the stairs. He had some kind of orange ichor splashed over the front of his shirt and was sporting a bloody gash across his shoulders.
"I'm sorry," Grisha said, as he calmly bent the iron poker back into something close to it's original shape and hung it by the fireplace. "My wife needed some help squashing a spider."
"So its true then," Andrew said shakily. "About there being giant spiders here?"
"Oh no," Grisha waved his hand dismissively. "That was just your normal, regular sized spider. Get them in the house occasionally."
"N-normal spider..."
"Oh yes. A little on the small side actually."
"Sma... Oh, look at the time," Andrew made a show of looking at his watch. "I'm sorry, it looks like I need to run or I'll miss my boat. Terribly sorry."
"No problem," Grisha smiled warmly. "I understand completely."
----
"Come on Thomas, show us!"
"Yeah man, you've been teasing us all morning with that thing."
A large crowd had gathered around Thomas Wagner in the mess hall. Thomas had come back from their free day with a small wicker basket, the contents of which he had refused to tell anyone, only dropping hints that it was something awesome.
"Well okay," Thomas finally relented, a grin on his face. He was enjoying being the center of attention "Brace yourselves."
He cracked open the lid, four long segmented legs languidly reached out from the darkness, followed by a eight beady black eyes, a large bulbous body, and four more legs.
One of the girls screamed.
"It's a spider," Thomas laughed, holding the arachnid in the air. It was a tarantula. As big as his hand and covered in orange fur. "Boo!" He waved the spider in another girls face. She let out a shriek and jumped backwards in shock. "Ah he's harmless. Guy at the market says he eats mice. Bah!" He flashed the spider in Mikasa's face. She didn't even flinch. Disappointed at not getting a reaction, he continued. "I'm gonna keep him under my bunk, see if he gets rid of some of the mice."
That got a reaction.
"No way in hell!"
"I'd rather have mice than that thing crawling all over me!"
"Thomas I swear if I see that thing anyway near my bunk..."
Armin, Eren, and Mikasa decided they had seen enough. Without a word to anyone, they returned to their table and resumed their meal.
"That was interesting," Armin remarked mildly.
"I know," Eren replied. "I didn't know spiders could actually get that small."
----
It was sometime around midnight when Jean woke up needing to use the outhouse. Since cadets weren't supposed to be out of bed at this time, he didn't bring a candle, instead relying on the bright light of the full moon to make his way across the yard to the privy. His business done he made to head back to the barracks when a rustling from a bush caught his attention. It took him a few a second to fully process what he was seeing.
It was only the biggest spider he had ever seen in his life. By his panicked estimation, it was about the same size as the huge bull mastiffs the merchants in Trost used as guard dogs.
Jean would claim later that he didn't scream. That half of the base that claimed to have been woken up by a banshee that night told a different story. Besides, something had to have woken Armin up. The next thing Jean knew, there was this blonde blur, and the spider was suddenly lying belly-up on the grass, a bread knife sticking out of its thorax.
Armin, still in his pajamas, watched Jean through sleepy eyes as the other boy tried to get his heart-rate back under control. He turned his gaze back to the dead spider.
"You woke me up for this?"
----
"What'd Horseface want?" Eren mumbled, as Armin climbed back into the bunk.
"Found a spider, needed help squashing it."
"Was it at least a big spider?"
Armin snorted. "Tiny little thing."
"Wimp."
----
Kieth Shadis stared at the dead spider with a sense of numb dread. It was at least the size of a fully grown draft horse. He hadn't seen a spider this big since the Scouting Legion was forced to stay overnight in Shiganshina once.
"It was horrible," the cadet beside him muttered. "I was doing the obstacle course, and got caught in it's web. I was cutting myself free when I saw it coming towards me. Oh walls, it was going to eat me alive. Suck out my juices! Oh walls...."
Shadis took another deep breath and turned towards the other cadet who had accompanied him. "Well Jeager, you went through first, why didn't you say anything about giant spiders?"
Eren looked at him blankly. "Because I didn't see any sir."
"Bullshit," Shadis snapped. "There were webs everywhere. You can't tell me you didn't see them."
"But," Eren looked confused. "Those were just tiny spiders sir. I'm telling you I didn't see any evidence of giant spiders when I went through."
"What prey-tell then, do you call that!?" Shadis roared, gesturing to the dead spider.
If anything, Eren looked even more confused. "A tiny spider sir."
"A tiny...!?" Shadis sputtered. "What do you call a giant spider then!?"
"Well it has to be as big as..." Eren made a vague gesture towards the trainee barracks. "No... The mess hall! It'd have to be as big as the mess hall before you could really call it a giant spider sir."
"The...!?" Something in Shadis's brain clicked. "Goddamnit, you're from Shiganshina aren't you Jeager?"
----
Titans were the stuff of nightmares. Their unnatural appetite for human flesh haunted the collective dreams of humanity and their forms, twisted mockeries of the human body, were enough to inspire fear in the bravest hearts. But all that didn't even hold a candle to the primeval, bone-chilling, blind terror people experienced when confronted with spiders of similar proportions.
"Did you get Jeager!?"
"Sadly no," Dot Pixis said, holding an icepack over his black eye. "No, Eren Jeager will enter into the service of the Scouting Legion. So we will not be getting a fifteen meter titan to squash spiders."
There was a groan of dismay among the assembled garrison officers. "If you don't mind us asking sir, what happened at the hearing?" One of them finally asked.
"Well..." Pixis leaned back in his chair. "There were three of us making a petition. Nile Dawk, Erwin Smith, and myself. Dawk wanted Jeager assigned to the Military Police so that he could prevent the spiders from breaching the Inner City. I of course, was arguing instead that Jeager be assigned to the Garrison under my command so that he could provide vital help in combating the spiders already in Wall Rose. As you know, our beloved Walls have been... less than effective at keeping the spiders at bay."
"Fucking useless you mean," Someone muttered from the back of the crowd. "Damn spiders just climb right up them."
"As for Commander Smith," Pixis continued, ignoring the remark. "He was petitioning on the grounds that the spiders were a minor threat, and that we should take advantage of Jeager's powers to try and retake Wall Maria. Well, we argued for few hours over our respective points and we may have taken things a little too personally. Dawk made some remark about Smith being a "spider-loving, titan-fucker," I believe his exact words were. Smith retaliated by calling us both "bribe sucking ingrates with our heads up our ass," and to be fair, I really shouldn't have said those things about his mother. Well, things got a bit out of control after that. Dawk managed to get a good hit on me with a chair, but I took him out with the old one-two. As for Smith I think I broke at least three of his ribs, but... well..." He adjusted his other icepack. "I always said the man was a ruthless bastard. Because he was the last one standing Zackly granted him permission to have Jeager inducted into the Scouting Legion. Couldn't have happened to a bigger... I mean a better man."
"So, what are we going to do about the spiders then?" Riza finally asked. "I mean if we're not getting a titan to stomp them flat..."
"Don't worry," Pixis reassured them. "I have already hired an expert in spider extermination. He was born in Shiganshina before The Fall, and know better than most how to deal with spiders."
A knock sounded at the door. One of the Garrison officers opened it to reveal a boy, who couldn't be any more than ten years old.
"Heard you wanted me to squish some spiders sir?"
"That's right," Pixis nodded. "I want to hire you as an independent contractor working for the Garrison."
"I'll get paid right?"
"Two hundred per spider," the Commander agreed.
The boy paused to consider the offer. "Alright, that sounds fair. They're only small spiders after all."
----
There seemed to be less and less titans lurking in the lands between Wall Rose and Wall Maria with each passing year. There also seemed to be more and more abnormally large spiders lurking in the lands between Wall Rose and Wall Maria with each passing year. Many people in the Legion had made the correlation, even if no one dared say out loud what that correlation might imply.
Even though the answer was staring Erwin Smith in the face, in the form of a fifteen meter titan tangled in a spiders web.
"Well, I always said the fucking spiders had to be eating something besides giant flies," Levi remarked from his spot next to Erwin. "The fucking spiders don't even have a proper brain and they're still smarter than the dumbshit titans."
Erwin said nothing, and choosing instead to be thankful that Hanji was leading another scouting party some distance away and not here to bombard them with theories on why a spider would spin a web to catch a titan. Nevertheless, it was something that couldn't be ignored, no matter how much he so dearly wanted to. He was about to open his mouth to give an order, when a scream echoed through the trees.
"HOLY SHIT! ITS FUCKING HUGE!"
"ITS BIGGER THAN THAT! RUN!"
Erwin let out a long sigh. He had tried to instill in his troops a sense of discipline when it came to the spiders, and not have them panic at the first sight of anything with eight legs that was larger than a cat. He had even tried to get them to refer to the spiders in Shiganshinan terms. Having them call every spider they met "fucking huge" was becoming less and less helpful with every expedition.
"Why couldn't they be more like Arlert, Jeager, or Ackerman?" he muttered to himself. "Instead of screaming at every spider they see."
Levi frowned in confusion. "I thought that sounded like..."
He never got to finish as Mikasa galloped past him out of the bush, streaking by the two men without even a single glance back. Eren followed after her, swearing violently, and casting sharp glances behind as if he expected something to be chasing him. Arlert was right on his heels. The look on his face would later give Erwin nightmares for months, what he shouted out next was even worse.
"SPIDER! FUCKING HUGEASS GODDAMN SPIDER!"
Erwin watched with horror as a gigantic shadow descended from the treetops in the direction of the trapped titan.