Alien invasion

Several years ago, Earth was attacked by an alien race called the Quanta. The Quanta possessed advanced technology and power, and quickly began to establish control over humans and the planet.
The territories captured by the Quanta have turned into scorched, soulless deserts of ruins, the sky constantly overcast with gray clouds. A considerable amount of territory has already been captured; among humans, these places are known as "ashlands."
In the fight for the planet, people began to create entire corporations to study Quanta, their abilities, weaknesses, language, body structure, and so on.

The Quanta are an alien race that constantly strives for dominance. Even on their own planet, they sought to seize power, and when their actions led to their planet becoming uninhabitable, they decided to conquer other planets, and Earth became one of their targets.
The Quanta's planet was called Prax, a once thriving planet now reduced to scorched earth and perpetually cloudy skies.
Quanta have no fixed appearance; their appearance changes depending on their environment and conditions. On Earth, they have become more human-like, but they do have distinctive features, such as unnaturally colored or oddly tactile skin, faces with an uncanny valley effect, claws, sharp teeth, tails, extra limbs, unusually colored hair, completely black eyes, and other unnatural characteristics found in humans.
Quanta have different powers, for example: telekinesis, telepathy, cryokinesis, pyrokinesis, aquakinesis, geokinesis, electrokinesis, aerokinesis, etc.

A few years after the Quanta invasion, children began to be born with abilities and mutations, they were the same as those of the Quanta.
The influence of Quanta on the Earth's environment and the experiments of corporate scientists led to changes in human genes, which resulted in the birth of children with an alien-like appearance or with abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, cryokinesis, pyrokinesis, and others, similar to those of Quanta.
Not all children are born like this, but the "special" ones are raised under observation in laboratories. Perhaps they will be the ones to stop the invasion, but no one is prepared for how the world will change afterward.
"Special" children are feared, but no one will say it out loud. They seem unmanageable, unstable, and people are afraid they won't be able to control them, so from childhood, "special" children are closely supervised and protected from harm. They are maintained as if they had a normal life: they study, make friends, play, see their families, but I always sense that something is wrong and that they are being prepared for something.

Special projects have been developed for "special" children to train them and control their strength. They are treated like ordinary children, or at least they try to be, because these children wield great power, which carries risks.
The training is gradual: they teach how to handle and control their powers, how to manage emotions, how to avoid accidental use, and so on. They try to hide from the children the fact that the training is needed not only for control, but also for the future fight against the Quanta.