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

This just happened to me as well. I've been using the same merc for some time and never replace the others. I took a break from the main league to go play some Gauntlet. Now that I've logged back into my main character, the active merc is gone. The two standby mercs are still in the hideout.