Mercenary Deleted

My mercenary was deleted and is no where to be found.

I had three mercs, my second one being recently obtained.I moved my equipment to the new merc (~10 divine worth of gear) and I noticed sometime later after entering a map I suddenly had no merc. I go back to my hideout and there only 2 mercs, the new one is gone.
I cannot recall if this merc ran with me for even 1 map before deleting itself as I don't know when or how I lost him.

I am very confused by the situation and am honestly quite upset as most of my investment this league so far has went into the merc.
I hope that I foolishly released him somehow and this isn't a bug because if this is happening to others it will be tragic!

Edit: This happened to me a second time while leveling, I believe I started a duel to replace my current merc but I lost the duel, leaving me with the merc gone. Is this intentionally how it is designed?
I also don't think I would have done this with my valuable merc but it left me in the same position so it is of note.

I will appreciate any and all help that can be provided. Thank you.

Oh wow.. this concerns me - I pretty much have like 15D worth of MF gear on him as my culler -_- ugh!! taking screen shots for security.

Bump, the same thing just happened to me.

I lost 2 geared mercs. In the beginning everything worked perfectly. Then I started leveling at alt, after some time I noticed that the merc I was using with my main was gone from my hideout. I logged into the other character to confirm if it was gone, which it was. I invited a another merc and went to a map, to see if that would fix it. But instead it deleted both.

PLEASE LOOK INTO THIS GGG