Secutarii - History: The Secutarii share a common ancestry with the Skitarii Legions as they were both founded on sacred Mars in a time that largely predates the foundation of the Imperium of Mankind. But where the Skitarii are directly bound in service to their home Forge World or the heavily augmented Thallaxii serve only the Ordo Reductor, the Secutarii were created specifically to serve as honour guards and protectors of the ancient Mechanicum's most powerful weapons: the God-engines of the Collegia Titanica. While on the battlefield the power of the Titans is absolute, their sheer scale and prominence leads to certain vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities the Secutarii are designed to counter. The foremost of their roles are to provide close protection and defence of the Titans from covert assaults, infiltration attempts and ambushes, especially when the Titans are not in the field, but resupplying behind the frontline. Yet, it is also the Secutarii's sacred duty to accompany the Titans on the battlefield and keep them from being overrun by ground troops, for despite their unsurpassed power of destruction, even a Titan can fall if it is beset at close range by a well-armed and determined infantry force, much like a mighty beast ultimately brought low by the stings of venomous insects.The Secutarii's second battlefield role is to sweep in behind the God-engines of the Collegia Titanica and destroy whatever has weathered their fearful firepower, for while a Titan might shatter a mighty fortress or blast a tank company to ashes in mere solar minutes, its might cannot be squandered on the eradication of those few survivors left in its wake. While the Titan will press on to more important targets, the Secutarii will mercilessly hunt down and slay those that would seek to escape the wrath of the Machine God.Alongside the Scutarii machine-labour corps who attend to the sustenance, repair, re-arming and refuelling of the Legion's Titans in the field, the Secutarii Titan-Guard are part of the auxiliary force directly under control of the Magi of the Titan Autokratis. Here, it is the Secutarii's sworn duty to defend the Titan's landing fields and supply lines from assault as well as to reach those hulks of disabled, damaged or destroyed Titans and defend them from plunder or sabotage by the enemy. Another of their sacred charges is the assistance or rescue of those Titan crew forced to abandon their God-engine and the retrieval of their mortal remains if they have been left in the wreckage. In this sacred task, the Secutarii consider their own lives utterly expandable if it serves to save the life of one of the Legion's Princeps'.Although since the Age of Strife the long history of the Secutarii has filled many glorious chapters, the finest of these chapters were written during the Great Crusade. At the height of the Imperium's power, each fully-operating Titan Legion possessed its own attendant regiments of Secutarii. When the apocalyptic wars of the Horus Heresy split the Imperium asunder, Titan Legions could be found on both sides of the conflict and so the Secutarii would fight and die both in the names of the Emperor of Mankind and that of the Traitor Warmaster Horus Lupercal, faultlessly loyal to the God-machines they had sworn to protect.